Canada's National Observer

Canada's National Observer
Type	Daily news website
Format	Online newspaper
Owner(s)	Observer Media Group
Publisher	Linda Solomon Wood
Editor-in-chief	Adrienne Tanner
Founded	2015
Headquarters	Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Website	www.nationalobserver.com

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]

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]

Notes

^ "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."

References

^ Owen, Laura Hazard (January 2018). "We stepped in and started doing it". Nieman Foundation for Journalism. Retrieved October 23, 2020.
^ ^a ^b Jesse Brown, Linda Solomon Wood (April 26, 2015). Our Oily Media. Canadaland. Retrieved January 3, 2016.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d "Reports from the Race Against Climate Change", Kickstarter, 2016
^ Livesey, Bruce (May 4, 2015). "How Canada made the Koch brothers rich". National Observer. Retrieved January 3, 2016.
^ Solomon Wood, Linda; Hatch, Chris (January 27, 2016). "Great Bear Rainforest: Canada's gift to the world". National Observer. Retrieved October 24, 2020.
^ ^a ^b 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.
^ Mitrovica, Andrew (December 22, 2015). "The Post is Toast: The disintegration of the Postmedia chain". iPolitics. Retrieved October 25, 2020.
^ Livesey, Bruce (November 24, 2015). "The tawdry fall of the Postmedia newspaper empire". National Observer. Retrieved October 24, 2020.
^ Inniss, Sandra (November 10, 2017). "Ces petites salles de nouvelles qui enquêtent". JSource. Retrieved October 24, 2020.
^ Beers, David (November 8, 2017). "A good news story about the news in British Columbia". The Conversation. Retrieved October 24, 2020.