Illustration: Sam Hester

Our best week of 2024, by far

Suddenly it’s not about The Sprawl surviving — but thriving.

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Talk about an early Christmas present.

Last Saturday, I wrote about The Sprawl’s dire straits—how we lost over $20,000 in 2024 and would likely fold next year if we didn’t receive more financial support.

With this in mind, we set a goal of raising $2,000 in monthly crowdfunding revenue to save The Sprawl and make it through 2025. I fully realized we would not hit this target by the end of December. A target of $2,000 total would be very doable by then. But $2,000 in monthly revenue? No way. It wasn’t realistic.

But we could start now, and keep pushing in the New Year. We’d have to.

What followed was a flood of community support unlike anything I have ever experienced. We got over halfway to our goal on the first day. New members signed up. Former members returned. Current members increased their contributions. All through the week, support kept pouring in.

Meanwhile, as all of this was happening, I was working with Sam Hester on her new Curious Calgary comic about Broadcast Hill (which is out today—read it here!).

It got me reflecting on my start as a journalist, and why I do any of this in the first place. I interned in CFCN-TV’s newsroom on Broadcast Hill as a journalism student in 2004. Didn’t I have a VHS tape of some of my CFCN stories down in the basement somewhere?

I started pulling out boxes on Monday and aha—there it was!

This gave me an excuse to do something I’ve been meaning to do for years: visit Ty Reynolds Video Services in Inglewood, not far from the Blackfoot Diner. I had asked friends before where I could go to get old VHS tapes digitized, and numerous people had told me that I absolutely had to go Ty’s, if only to see his storefront.

I walked in on Monday and was not disappointed.

The place is jammed with vintage local paraphernalia and communications technology. Radios, TVs, cameras, a cylinder phonograph. (Could a future Sprawlcast episode be recorded onto a wax cylinder, like the Hello Internet podcast did a few years back? Do not tempt me!)

Ty Reynolds Video Services on 9 Avenue S.E. Photo: Jeremy Klaszus

When I dropped off my tapes, Reynolds and I got to chatting about CFCN history and longtime station news anchor Darrel Janz, who died in November. We recalled Janz’s story of how, when he was a young broadcaster in Montreal, the traffic helicopter he was in plunged into the St. Lawrence River while the Montreal Expos played their first-ever home game in April 1969. Janz and company were trying to rescue someone whose boat had capsized when their chopper went into the drink—and then they had to be rescued. What a yarn!

Janz was one of the greats.

Reynolds lamented the loss of CFCN’s original radio station, AM 1060, which was one of the first in Calgary. It went off the air in 2023, a victim of Bell Media cost-cutting. It was the first station in Canada to have regular newscasts; by the end, it was an all-comedy station. I hadn’t even realized it was gone. Other radio stations have similarly cut back on local programming. Meanwhile, the CTV Calgary newsroom has been significantly thinned since Janz read the news.

On the way home from Ty’s, I switched on AM 1060 in the car. Dead air. I left the radio hissing as I drove through the grey winter fog.

At home, I showed my family my old CFCN stories, including a particularly hard-hitting piece on warm weather in November, and we all had a good laugh. (They’re now on YouTube. Watch at your own risk!)

Reporting on Broadcast Hill in 2004.

Being on Broadcast Hill was a thrill for a young journalist but I knew pretty quickly that TV news was not for me. Nor was rewriting other reporters’ stories as quick web hits, which I did briefly for CFCN a couple years after my internship. “My passion is for on-the-ground reporting and writing,” I wrote in my resignation letter. “I will be pursuing other opportunities as a print journalist.”

Print journalist—how quaint! Little did I know.

But looking back, I’m glad that I followed that inner prompt. Leaving CFCN led me to Fast Forward Weekly, where I learned to report on Calgary city issues in depth. I loved it. To this day, that’s the kind of journalism I love the most. Stories that connect people to the city where they live. And today I have the incredible fortune of being able to independently do these stories with The Sprawl.

I often fret about the future of journalism and how there doesn’t seem to be much of one. There’s no real roadmap for making it work. The sensible path is to get out, pronto! But this week, Calgarians made another path possible: keep going! We've received hundreds of messages of encouragement this week, and that’s been the driving message common to them all. Keep going. Calgary needs The Sprawl. We support you.

And that long-shot fundraising goal? By the end of the week, Calgarians had not only pushed us to our fundraising goal—but past it.

Illustration: Sam Hester

I’m so grateful to every single person who has contributed. Thanks to you, it’s not a matter of The Sprawl surviving 2025—but thriving. This was unimaginable a week ago. What a turnaround, and a positive note to end the year on!

If you want to get in on the local love, it’s not too late to pitch in—not at all. In fact, a generous donor has offered to match donations to The Sprawl in December, up to a total of $2,500. In other words, your December donation will be doubled!

We also have gift memberships available for anyone looking for a last-minute Christmas gift (and the doubling of your dollars applies to gift memberships, too). We’ve even made a special zine about The Sprawl specifically for gift membership recipients, which you can print yourself immediately after you purchase a gift membership. Easy peasy.

Thanks so much for the support and see you in 2025!

Jeremy Klaszus is founder and editor of The Sprawl.

Support independent Calgary journalism!

Sign Me Up!

The Sprawl connects Calgarians with their city through in-depth, curiosity-driven journalism. If you value independent local news, support our work so we can keep digging into municipal issues in the run-up to the 2025 civic election—and beyond!