Canada's National Observer

Last updated

Canada's National Observer
No logo two lines01 (1).png
TypeDaily news website
Format Online newspaper
Owner(s)Observer Media Group
PublisherLinda Solomon Wood
Editor-in-chief Adrienne Tanner
Founded2015 (2015)
Headquarters Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Website www.nationalobserver.com OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

Canada's National Observer (CNO) is a news website that features daily news, analysis and opinion on energy, climate, politics, and social issues. [1] By 2015, CNO had a Vancouver office and later opened offices in Ottawa and Toronto. [2]

Contents

History

In its 2016 Kickstarter campaign, CNO described the journalism it set out to do as a "dramatic new series about the world's fight to beat climate change." [3] The original team included Charles Mandel, Elizabeth McSheffrey, Bruce Livesey, Sandy Garossino, Jenny Uechi, Mike De Souza, Valentina Ruiz Leotaud, and Bruno De Bondt, with Linda Solomon Wood as editor-in-chief." [3] The campaign crowdsourced $70,863 from 784 backers. [3] [2] The 2016 Kickstarter campaign listed issues that CNO's investigative journalists would cover, including the role of corporations that impede change, climate policies related to the 2015 Paris Agreement, food security, the oil sands, hydraulic fracturing in Canada, and animal welfare. [3] The centrepiece of CNO's launch was Bruce Livesey's May 4, 2015 article, "How Canada made the Koch brothers rich." [4] . On January 1, 2016, CNO published the first in a special series of articles on the Great Bear Rainforest in partnership with Tides Canada, Teck, and Vancity. [5]

In a 2016 article, National Post columnist Terence Corcoran described a "newspaper war" between the Postmedia Network and the Toronto Star . [6] He criticized Torstar's "series of personal and corporate attacks" against Postmedia, in particular CNO reporter Bruce Livesey's massive "5,000-word take down" of Postmedia. [7] Livesey's article was published in both the CNO [8] and in the Star. Corcoran said Livesey was "a master of the inappropriate juxtaposition of fact and conclusion" and called the CNO a "left-wing Vancouver online magazine". [6]

In October 2017, CNO teamed up with The Toronto Star, Global News , the Michener Awards Foundation, the University of Victoria-led Corporate Mapping Project [Notes 1] and four journalism schools for "the largest collaborative journalism project in Canadian history." [9] The "Price of Oil" project was created for the purpose of "tracking oil industry influence in partnership with investigative journalism students from across the country." [10]

See also

Notes

  1. "The Corporate Mapping Project brings together a large team of academic and community-based researchers, and advisors from environmental, Indigenous, labour and independent media groups. The project is hosted by the University of Victoria, and jointly led by UVic, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the Parkland Institute, together with a larger group of partners."

Related Research Articles

<i>Vancouver Sun</i> Canadian daily newspaper

The Vancouver Sun, also known as the Sun, is a daily broadsheet newspaper based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The newspaper is currently published by the Pacific Newspaper Group, a division of Postmedia Network, and is the largest newspaper in western Canada by circulation. Since 2022, it is published five days a week from Tuesday to Saturday.

<i>National Post</i> Canadian national daily newspaper

The National Post is a Canadian English-language broadsheet newspaper available in several cities in central and western Canada. The paper is the flagship publication of Postmedia Network and is published Mondays through Saturdays, with Monday released as a digital e-edition only. The newspaper is distributed in the provinces of Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia. Weekend editions of the newspaper are also distributed in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

<i>Toronto Sun</i> Canadian tabloid newspaper published in Toronto

The Toronto Sun is an English-language tabloid newspaper published daily in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The newspaper is one of several Sun tabloids published by Postmedia Network. The newspaper's offices are located at Postmedia Place in downtown Toronto.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bruce McDonald (director)</span> Canadian film director, film producer and film editor

Bruce McDonald is a Canadian film and television director, writer, and producer. Born in Kingston, Ontario, he rose to prominence in the 1980s as part of the loosely-affiliated Toronto New Wave.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Evan Solomon</span> Canadian columnist, political journalist and radio host

Evan Solomon is a Canadian columnist, political journalist, radio host, and publisher. Until 2022, he was the host of The Evan Solomon Show on Toronto-area talk radio station CFRB, and a writer for Maclean's magazine. He was the host of CTV's national political news programs Power Play and Question Period.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Torstar</span> Canadian mass media company

Torstar Corporation is a Canadian mass media company which primarily publishes news. In addition to the Toronto Star, its flagship and namesake, Torstar also publishes daily newspapers in Hamilton, Peterborough, Niagara Region, and Waterloo Region In addition to the Metroland Media Group and a minority position on Canadian Press. The corporation was initially established in 1958 to take over operations of the Star from the Atkinson Foundation after a provincial law banned charitable organizations from owning for-profit entities. From 1958 to 2020, the class A shares of Torstar were held by the families of the original Atkinson Foundation trustees. The private investment firm NordStar Capital LP, now owned by Jordan Bitove, acquired the company in 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Suzuki Foundation</span> Canadian nonprofit environmental organisation

The David Suzuki Foundation is a science-based non-profit environmental organization headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, with offices in Montreal and Toronto. It was established as a federally registered Canadian charity on January 1, 1991. By 2007, it had 40,000 donors. Its mission is to protect nature while balancing human needs. It is supported entirely by Foundation grants and donations and by 2012, 90% of its donors were Canadian. By 2007, the Foundation employed about seventy-five staff members.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Kent</span> Former Canadian politician

James Peter Kent is a former Canadian journalist and former politician who served as the Conservative Member of Parliament for the riding of Thornhill from 2008 to 2021. He served as Minister of the Environment in the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Before entering politics, he was Deputy Editor of the Global Television Network, a Canadian TV network. He has worked as a news editor, producer, foreign correspondent, and news anchorman on Canadian and American television networks.

<i>Calgary Herald</i> Daily newspaper published in Calgary, Alberta, Canada

The Calgary Herald is a daily newspaper published in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Publication began in 1883 as The Calgary Herald, Mining and Ranche Advocate, and General Advertiser. It is owned by the Postmedia Network.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arthur Kent</span> Canadian television journalist

Arthur Kent is a Canadian television journalist and author. He rose to international prominence during the 1991 Persian Gulf War during which he acquired the nickname "The Scud Stud". He is the brother of Canada's former Minister of the Environment Peter Kent.

Terence "Terry" Dollard Corcoran is columnist and comment editor for the Financial Post section of the Toronto-based National Post.

Lawrence Solomon is a Canadian writer on the environment and the executive director of Energy Probe, a Canadian non-governmental environmental policy organization, a member of the advisory board of Rebel News, and a columnist for The Epoch Times. His writing has appeared in a number of newspapers, including the National Post, where he has a column, and he is the author of several books on energy resources, urban sprawl, and global warming, among them The Conserver Solution (1978), Energy Shock (1980), Toronto Sprawls: A History (2007), and The Deniers (2008).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DeSmog</span> Blog focusing on topics related to global warming

DeSmog, founded in January 2006, is a journalistic and activist website that focuses on topics related to climate change. The site was founded, originally in blog format, by James Hoggan, president of a public relations firm based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew Weaver</span> Canadian scientist and politician

Andrew John Weaver is a Canadian scientist and politician who represented the riding of Oak Bay-Gordon Head from 2013 to 2020 in the British Columbia Legislative Assembly. Weaver was the leader of the Green Party of British Columbia from 2015 to 2020. After leaving the Green caucus in January 2020, he continued to sit as an independent member but did not run for reelection in the 2020 BC election.

The Vancouver Observer is an independent online newspaper. The site was founded in 2006 by journalist Linda Solomon as an online platform for Vancouver bloggers, writers, reporters, photographers and filmmakers. Novelist Ruth Ozeki was involved in the early stages of the site as an adviser. The Vancouver Observer covers local politics, arts, the environment, technology, health, nutrition, and other topics. It also provides online events listings and a forum for individuals to upload their own stories. The Observer also has a YouTube channel, which features interviews and mini-documentaries.

Postmedia Network Canada Corp. is a Canadian media conglomerate consisting of the publishing properties of the former Canwest, with primary operations in newspaper publishing, news gathering and Internet operations. It is best known for being the owner of the National Post and the Financial Post. The company is headquartered at Postmedia Place on Bloor Street in Toronto.

<i>StarMetro</i> (newspaper) Defunct chain of Canadian free daily newspapers

StarMetro was a chain of Canadian free daily newspapers published in Calgary, Edmonton, Halifax, Toronto, and Vancouver. The chain was a joint venture between the Canadian publishing conglomerate Torstar and Swedish global media company Metro International. The chain was originally branded as Metro prior to rebranding on April 10, 2018. StarMetro was not affiliated with the French-language Métro newspaper published by TC Transcontinental in Montreal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rebel News</span> Canadian far-right political and social commentary media website

Rebel News is a Canadian far-right political and social commentary media website operated by Rebel News Network Ltd. It has been described as a "global platform" for the anti-Muslim ideology known as counter-jihad. It was founded in February 2015 by former Sun News Network personalities Ezra Levant and Brian Lilley.

The Canada Periodical Fund (CPF) provides financial assistance to Canadian print magazines, print community newspapers (non-daily) and digital periodicals. It is a program of the Government of Canada.

The Institute for Investigative Journalism (IIJ), is a Concordia University, Montréal, Québec-based institute, founded in 2018 by Patti Sonntag, that teaches, promotes and engages in investigative journalism on Canadian issues. The institute partners journalism students with reporters and editors from Canadian media outlets to work collaboratively on large-scale public service investigations. In 2019, the IIJ's "Tainted Water" project was a finalist for the Michener Award for public service projects. The collaboration included 143 journalists from Canadian journalism schools and news organizations—The Toronto Star, Le Devoir, Regina Leader-Post, Global News, National Observer, and Star Halifax/Vancouver/Calgary/Edmonton. The IIJ's project resulted in "Canada-wide commitments to replace lead pipes and test water more rigorously". The IIJ project was described as a "new way to produce great public-service journalism".

References

  1. Owen, Laura Hazard (January 2018). "We stepped in and started doing it". Nieman Foundation for Journalism . Retrieved October 23, 2020.
  2. 1 2 Jesse Brown, Linda Solomon Wood (April 26, 2015). Our Oily Media. Canadaland . Retrieved January 3, 2016.
  3. 1 2 3 4 "Reports from the Race Against Climate Change", Kickstarter, 2016
  4. Livesey, Bruce (May 4, 2015). "How Canada made the Koch brothers rich". National Observer. Retrieved January 3, 2016.
  5. Solomon Wood, Linda; Hatch, Chris (January 27, 2016). "Great Bear Rainforest: Canada's gift to the world". National Observer. Retrieved October 24, 2020.
  6. 1 2 Corcoran, Terence (February 20, 2016). "A falling Star: No cash in its dowry, declining revenues and no obvious marriage prospects". National Post. Retrieved August 28, 2019.
  7. Mitrovica, Andrew (December 22, 2015). "The Post is Toast: The disintegration of the Postmedia chain". iPolitics. Retrieved October 25, 2020.
  8. Livesey, Bruce (November 24, 2015). "The tawdry fall of the Postmedia newspaper empire". National Observer. Retrieved October 24, 2020.
  9. Inniss, Sandra (November 10, 2017). "Ces petites salles de nouvelles qui enquêtent". JSource. Retrieved October 24, 2020.
  10. Beers, David (November 8, 2017). "A good news story about the news in British Columbia". The Conversation . Retrieved October 24, 2020.