National Observer (Canada)

Canada's National Observer was described as a "daily news site covering issues like government, the environment, health, climate change, and human rights, all with a progressive bent" in a 2018 profile of editor-in-chief Linda Solomon Wood by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism.[2] National Observer's owner, Observer Media Group, was a certified B Corporation. [3] By 2015, they had a Vancouver office and later opened offices in Ottawa and Toronto.[1]

In their 2016 Kickstarter campaign they described themselves as raising funds for a "dramatic new series about the world's fight to beat climate change."[4] Their original team included Charles Mandel, Elizabeth McSheffrey, Bruce Livesey, Sandy Garossino, Jenny Uechi, Mike De Souza, Valentina Ruiz Leotaud, Bruno De Bondt, and Solomon Wood as editor-in-chief."[4] Through the campaign they crowd-sourced $70,863 from 784 backers.[4][1] Their 2016 Kickstarter campaign listed issues that their investigative journalists would cover, including the role of corporations that impede change, climate policies related to the 2015 Paris Agreement—part of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, food security, the oil sands, hydraulic fracturing in Canada, and animal welfare.[4]

The centre piece of the Observer's launch was Bruce Livesey's May 4, 2015 article, "How Canada made the Koch brothers rich."[5]

On January 1, 2016, the Observer published the first in a special series of articles on the Great Bear Rainforest in partnership with Tides Canada, Teck, and Vancity.[6]

In October 2017, National Observer 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."[7] 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."[8]

According to J-Source, in August 2014, Linda Solomon Wood, who is CEO Observer Media Group announced the planned launch of a national version of the Vancouver Observer, an online journalism site that she had created and managed since 2006.[9][1]

Solomon Wood moved from New York City to Canada in 2001, partly because of air pollution fall out after 9/11.[1]

On January 1, 2016, the Observer published the first in a special series of articles on the Great Bear Rainforest in partnership with Tides Canada, Teck, and Vancity.[6] Canadaland's Jesse Brown questioned how funding from philanthropists influences the Observer s journalistic objectivity.[1]

During a 2015 Canadaland interview, Solomon Wood said that the original idea behind National Observer was "to counter the influence of the energy industry's multi-million dollar spending on ads and editorial partnerships with mainstream media through factual independent reporting".[1]

Sandy Garossino is an award-winning writer and a national affairs columnist for National Observer. She is a former Crown prosecutor and media commentator, according to The Tyee. The Tyee said her son-in-law, "at least unofficially, is Elon Musk. Garossino’s daughter is Claire Boucher, a.k.a. Grimes, the musical superstar." Garossino broke the story for National Observer about Senator Mike Duffy's redacted diaries that had suggested that Enbridge pipeline company had regularly lobbied Duffy to reach then Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2012, while Harper was engaged in "scorching attacks on environmental activists and charities." The redacted diaries story was covered in a number of media outlets including the Calgary Herald the Huffington Post, the Narwhal, and CBC.

One of National Observer’s first reporters was Toronto-based Bruce Livesey —an award-winning investigative journalist and author, formerly with CBC and Global.[10] In 2014, Livesey had been commissioned to produce an investigative documentary for Global Television, about the American billionaire brothers, Charles and David Koch, who own Koch Industries, a "global behemoth" with extensive holdings in Alberta's oil sands—"from 1.1 million to as much as two million acres" worth "tens of billions of dollars", and "their interest" in the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.[5] Canadaland reported on February 5, 2015 that Global had pulled Livesey's Global News article[11] and the documentary two days before it was to be aired.[12] Although Livesey says he had nothing to do with the Canadaland report, Global fired him immediately.[5] Livesey undertook further research on the Koch brothers connections to the oil sands,[1] and published the article, "How Canada made the Koch brothers rich" on May 4, 2015 as part of the launching of the National Observer.[5] In the article, he described how the Koch brothers had launched attacks on numerous media outlets, including an attack against Edmonton Journal's reporter, Karen Kleiss, for her 2011 article that said that the Kochs had hired a lobbyist in Alberta.[5] His and other National Observer reporters' coverage of the oil and gas industry's push to build or enlarge pipelines across Canada has sparked interest amongst politicians, journalists, commentators, academics, NGOs, and social media influencers.[13]

In 2017, Livesey's series for the Observer on K. C. Irving's family won a National Newspaper Award.[10]

Mike De Souza, who is managing editor of investigations with Global News, served as the Observer managing editor from April 2016 to 2019.[14] Da Souza, who was originally from Montreal, had covered politics at the National Assembly of Quebec, Parliament Hill in Ottawa and Calgary, which included eight years writing on energy issues for Postmedia s at their Ottawa-based parliamentary office.[15]

De Souza broke a story that became known as 'the Charest affair' in July 2016.[16] Through Freedom of Information requests, he discovered that Quebec's Jean Charest gave political advice to members of a federal panel reviewing a major TransCanada Corporation pipeline project in a private meeting while he was under contract with the Alberta-based company.[16] This story sparked reactions across the country and was quoted by dozens of other media outlets, including the Montreal Gazette, Toronto Star, CBC, Le Devoir, and Le Soleil. In June 2017, De Souza was named a finalist for the 2017 Michener Award for his reporting on the Charest affair.[17]

In his 2016 article, National Post journalist Terence Corcoran described a "newspaper war" between the Postmedia Network and the Toronto Star and criticized Torstar's "series of personal and corporate attacks" on Postmedia, in general, and National Observer reporter Bruce Livesey's massive "5,000-word take down" of Postmedia in particular.[18] Livesey's article was published in both the Observer[19] and in the Star. Corcoran said that Livesey was "a master of the inappropriate juxtaposition of fact and conclusion",[20] and the National Observer was a "left-wing Vancouver online magazine".[20]

• The Vancouver Observer