Canadian Startup Unveils Plan To Revive Local News

Local journalism has shed jobs faster than the coal industry, leaving swaths of news deserts with little or no regular coverage.

But The Guardian reports the grim prospects for an industry in decline didn’t deter the Canadian tech entrepreneur Andrew Wilkinson, who in 2019 hired a reporter and launched a daily newsletter in his home town, Victoria.

Emailed to subscribers early each morning, Capital Daily gave residents news highlights from around the city. Wilkinson bought advertising on Facebook and Google and subscribers started pouring in.

A year later, the venture had more than 40,000 readers, and within two years, the Capital Daily has transformed from morning digest of the city’s news into an enterprising outlet publishing long-form investigative features.

Now, building on the newsletter’s success, a startup media group has unveiled ambitious plans to replicate the model across the country.

Overstory Media Group, which operates newsletter-based journalism outlets in British Columbia, including the Burnaby Beacon, Decomplicated and the Capital Daily, has announced plans to hire 250 new journalists and launch 50 new outlets by 2023.

“I’ve always believed community media was always going to survive,” said chief executive Farhan Mohamed, who co-founded the venture with Wilkinson. “But it just has to be done in the right way.”

The announcement comes at a difficult time for Canadian media, which has seen the same mass layoffs and newspaper closures as in the United States.

In 2017, 36 community newspapers were shut down – the largest mass closure in Canadian history – and hundreds of reporters laid off after the country’s largest media companies, TorStar and PostMedia, announced a deal to trade 41 community newspapers with one another as a cost-saving measure.

While Overstory plans to offer resources to each of the publications, Mohamed envisions the brands operating independently. Funded by Wilkinson as well as growing advertising revenues, the group’s current titles have shown they are sustainable and profitable, Mohamed says.

The idea of expanding across the country reflects both the success of the current outlets and deeply underserved markets outside of the large urban centers, he said.

Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal dominate much of the country’s focus, but residents of smaller towns and cities have an equally strong hunger for local news.

The Capital Daily, Overstory’s marquee brand, has quickly become one of Victoria’s most-read outlets.