Creator Spotlight - Paul Wells

The Canadian journalist and columnist shares a few thoughts with our readers.

Today’s creator profile features Paul Wells

Paul Wells

, journalist and newsletter publisher. He’s been a political journalist in Ottawa for almost 30 years, with 19 years writing for Maclean’s magazine, as well as writing for the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, the National Post and other publications, being a commentator on TV and radio, and authoring several best selling books.

During the past year Paul’s main publishing platform has become his Substack newsletter with a combination of written and podcast content. I’m very pleased that Paul agreed to this interview and I think you’ve find his thoughts provocative and interesting.

Here’s Paul!

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When you were a kid what did you want to be when you grew up?

A doctor. Sort of. I was a general-purpose smart kid growing up, with very broad interests and no particular gift. "Doctor" felt to me like a smart-kid answer. I tended to put more energy into creative subjects than science and math, but I never thought you could make a respectable living being creative. But within five weeks of starting at Western I had realized I would not have the marks to get into medical school, and by October of my second year I realized I didn't want to be in sciences at all. Fortunately by that point I had started writing for my campus paper.

What kind of jobs did you have prior to becoming a journalist?

I never had a simple boring money gig, even as a student. In high school I got hired by the Sarnia business improvement association to put together a Dixieland band to play on street corners to give some life to the downtown core. Amazingly that ran for two summers and led to other work playing in pubs and at parties. Then in university I worked on organizing French exchange programs for high-school students in my city and the Quebec City area. Again, two summers that hardly felt like work. After that it was all journalism gigs.

Tell us a bit about journalism, specifically something about journalism that most people don’t get or know about.

Lately I'm more interested in what journalists don't get about journalism, and I'll get to that. But on your question, I think most people who think they have a sophisticated understanding of journalistic agenda-setting — people who would have been on the Chomskyist left in the 1990s and are now likelier on the Ezra-ish right — would be amazed at how little time journalists spend checking in with one another to see whether we're on the correct side of whatever agenda we're supposed to have. Now that I've left the traditional large media organizations, people often speak to me as though I'm "finally free to tell the truth." I almost hate to tell them I've felt free for 30 years. Increasingly more constrained by declining budgets than by some highly politicized agenda-setting process.

As for what journalists don't get about journalism, increasingly it's basically this: Absolutely nobody buys our self-appointed role as guardians of the democratic process. All political actors are trying to keep us away from their decision-making process and from any clear understanding of the results of public policies. Readers and listeners who like the government in place, at any level, increasingly judge journalists harshly for trying to hold that government to account. There are far too many other ways for people to get information, or opinion they find congenial, or a mix of both. Journalism's "gatekeeper" function, to borrow a charged expression, has essentially gone away for good.

Tell us a bit about how you were awarded the Gold Cross of Merit (from Poland).

I was astonished to be awarded the Gold Cross of Merit of the Republic of Poland, bestowed by then-President Komorowski in about 2013 on the recommendation of Poland's then-ambassador to Canada. It's kind of hard to explain how it happened. The Gold Cross is a very high honour. It was often awarded to leaders of the Polish resistance during the war. But it's also a bit like the French Légion d'Honneur, given to foreigners who are seen as friends of the Republic. I guess that's me.

I'm not Polish at all, visited for the first time as a tourist in 1995, became interested when NATO and the EU expanded to include Poland and several other countries in 2004. I began writing about it, its complex history, its evolving role in Europe. Poland had the most democratic constitution in Europe in 1791; terrified of the example, its neighbouring countries invaded and partitioned Poland and it didn't exist again as a country until 1918. So part of my interest came from the contrast between Canada, which likes to complain about the neighbours, and Poland, which actually lives in a rough neighbourhood. Anyway it's a long story. Some people in Poland liked my writing, and suddenly I had a medal.

What’s your approach to interviewing? Any particular highlights from the many interviews you’ve done over the years?

Readers and listeners are probably best placed to judge my interviews. In general, my goal is to help the subject to talk, rather than to corner them and force a confession out of them. I'm proud of interviews I did with Kathleen Wynne, the former Ontario premier, and with Carlos Leitao, the former Quebec finance minister. Obviously failure is an interesting theme in politics, but to me it's also overrated — the point of talking to both of these people was that they finally had the freedom to talk about exercising power, not about losing it.

You’ve been a well known print and web journalist for many years, particularly known for your work for Macleans magaine and other mainstream media outlets, but now you’ve struck out on your own on Substack. How did that happen?

People have all kinds of theories about what I'm up to with the Substack. A lot of people think I'm doing this as a critique of the mainstream or legacy media. Not so much. Basically I got angry at my bosses and quit, and then discovered, very much on the fly, that I could build a more interesting work environment than anyone at a big shop was offering me.

In most ways I have amazing freedom in both content and tone. I can be highly polemical or I can just let the story or the subject speak for themselves. I can be funny or analytical. I try to make myself travel as often as is practical, because landing in the middle of a story and figuring my way out keeps me from falling too deeply in love with my own voice. Which is always a danger. The only limitation in the format is that the delivery mechanism is not subtle. I land in your phone. You give me a few paragraphs to decide whether I'm worth reading that day. If I abuse your attention or take it for granted, you won't look next time. That encourages me to avoid being repetitive or overly obscure. But I like to test readers' flexibility, and so far they've been amazingly accommodating.

Do you have preference for writing by hand or by using a keyboard?

My penmanship has deteriorated from always-shaky to atrocious, but I use pen and paper all the time. I tried to get my stepkids to take notes with a pen when they were growing up. Didn't work.

I still think the act of writing connects your brain to your fine motor skills in a way that aids the processing of information. So I like to take notes when I'm interviewing, so the words don't just wander past my brain. And any large writing project usually involves an hour or so of organizing ideas into possible structures, using a pen and notebook.

Any thoughts about social media: its prevalence and value?

I don't usually put it this starkly, but what the heck: I think the amount of time people piss away on social media will be seen, decades from now, as an astonishing waste of human capital that the species was lucky to survive. If we survive. Everything that makes humans capable of heroic effort is jeopardized by Twitter: patience, empathy, a sense of proportion, a willingness to engage physically with the world. I mean, you could get off your backside and go help somebody, or you could type a bunch of bad names at somebody you disagree with. And then forget why you were so angry an hour later.

I speak as somebody who had 60,000 Twitter followers and spent hours on the thing every day: Very close to none of it did anybody any good at all, including me. Most of my favourite movie directors aren't on Twitter, my favourite authors, my favourite musicians. They're too busy doing things. It's too easy to blame Elon Musk. Twitter was shitty before Elon Musk. It was born shitty. Make good your escape.

North America has seen its share of populist movements during the past decade, with Canada seeming to echo some of the Trumpism movements on the US political right. Any thoughts on this?

Like everyone, I thought Canada was immune to Trumpism. I still think it is, to some extent, but it's a very limited extent. Why should we be immune? Violent populism is basically fear mixed with a disinclination to hold oneself to high standards. "The bad people are coming and I don't have the luxury of being too fastidious about how I respond." It's always easy to rally at least some support for a politics of resentment based on those sentiments. Canada is a little more chilly and empty than some other places, but not otherwise particularly insulated.

Imagine you wake up one morning and you learn that the Internet has been destroyed. What’s the first thing that you do?

Life with no internet is far easier to imagine and enjoy than life with nothing but the internet. We know what the latter looks like: It looks like March and April and May of 2020. We still had all the information in the world at our fingertips during the lockdown. What we didn't have was anything worth touching. The first thing I missed was serendipity: running into somebody by accident downtown, having a conversation I hadn't scheduled via Zoom. Most of the things worth experiencing aren't online. Noticing the book next to the one you were looking for. The way air moves when music is going through it. The internet can help spread word about the stuff that's worth experiencing, but it's a lousy substitute for that stuff.

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Thanks to Paul for agreeing to be interviewed!