For more than a decade, CEO and editor-in-chief Linda Solomon Wood has been a leader in the digital re-invention of Canadian media and has helped to drive the national conversation on the environment, politics and climate change. She founded Canada's National Observer in 2015 and since has worked to establish a national publication that is rigorous about accuracy and that adheres to the highest standard of ethics. Coverage of the race against climate change at the intersection of politics, technology and culture is at the heart of CNO's mission and has been called essential by climate leaders such as David Suzuki, Maude Barlow and Bill McKibben. Canada's National Observer became a member of The Trust Project in 2020. Its opinion and analysis section provides a powerful platform for experts from every province, as well as to people throughout Canada, with an emphasis on diversity and inclusion.
In 2018, National Observer made history as the first all-digital publication to win a National Newspaper Award and a Michener Award citation. The Election Integrity Reporting Project placed National Observer at the center of Canada’s battle against online disinformation and electoral manipulation in 2019.
Linda has brought together a team that spans Canada to report on climate change, food security, disinformation, and regional and federal politics. In 2020, National Observer became a member of The Trust Project. It was certified as a B Corporation in 2017. After initially raising money for the publication through crowdfunding on Kickstarter, she moved National Observer to become a pay-walled publication in 2017.
As CEO of Observer Media Group and founder and editor-in-chief of Canada's National Observer, Linda has developed a business model that is supporting and sustaining public service journalism that investigates corruption, celebrates innovation, and illuminates and helps to make sense of the complex political and social challenges people face today. She expands National Observer's readership and impact through collaborations and partnerships with The Climate Desk (Mother Jones), The Centre for Investigative Journalism at Concordia University and, most recently The Investigative Journalism Bureau at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto.
In 2020, she launched a live online interview series sponsored by Canada's National Observer and produced by The Canadian Centre for Journalism that included guests Noam Chomsky, David Suzuki, Dick Fadden, Sandy Houston, Minister Catherine McKenna and Amy Goodman among many others.
She previously founded Vancouver Observer and has led both Observers to win Canada's top awards for public service, investigative journalism and excellence in reporting. She won the Vancouver Board of Trade's Wendy McDonald Award for Entrepreneurial Innovation in 2015.
She serves on the board of Community Newspapers Reciprocal Insurance Exchange, a Canadian not-for-profit organization, that provides crucial libel insurance as well as media law education, training and pre-publication advice for newspapers and digital news media. She is also on the Local Journalism Initiative review panel.
In 2009, she founded the now archived online news site, the Vancouver Observer, and served as its editor for six years.
Born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Linda began her journalism career as an investigative reporter for The Tennessean in Nashville. There she won the United Press International awards for Best Public Service Reporting and Best Investigative Reporting and the John Finney award for outstanding economics reporting. She later wrote for publications such as The Los Angeles Times, Orion, and the International Herald Tribune.
She lived in Paris and New York City before immigrating to Canada in 2001 and is the mother of four young people.
We stepped in and started doing it. How one woman built an award-winning news outlet from her dining room table.
