I'm the founder and publisher of Canada's National Observer (CNO). Previously, I was the editor-in-chief of CNO for eight years. Earlier, I led one of Vancouver's first hyperlocal digital-native sites, the Vancouver Observer, to prominence. I am driven to develop new revenue streams for high quality investigations and in-depth reporting, because I have seen  the power of journalism to improve people's lives, over and over again, since I first started as a journalist myself. I became a reporter when I was 16-years-old and worked for The Greenfield Recorder in Greenfield, Massachusetts. I wrote wedding notices and obituaries. I went to journalism school, shifted to a major in American Culture, became editor of The Daily Northwestern's opinion page, got a job in Nashville at an enterprising newspaper. I was lucky to be mentored at that newspaper by John Siegenthaler, who was the publisher of The Tennessean. 

His example showed me what a good publisher can be, not only on the business side, but by translating a passion for what journalism is at its best, to his staff. At The Tennessean, I won awards in investigative journalism and public service reporting from United Press International as an investigative journalist at The Tennessean, for a series that uncovered insurance fraud and another that revealed corruption in the local government bodies overseeing the city of Nashville's public housing projects. I had other remarkable opportunities as a young journalist. I pursued a story about how doctors were conspiring to undermine the businesses of nurse-midwives.  This was both a local story and a national story as women sought to de-medicalize birth, and I traveled to tell the story from Nashville to California.  

I left the Tennessean to strike out as a freelance reporter, following stories that took me to Africa and India to interview women who against great odds were improving their societies. My subjects included Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan environmentalist who went on to win a Nobel Peace Prize, Medha Patkar who was fighting a World Bank dam in India that was to (and did eventually) displace a million farmers, and Noreen Kaleeba who transformed the response to people with AIDS from brutal to compassionate in Uganda. I had my first child when I was thirty-nine years old and living in New York City, then gave birth to a second when I was forty-five and already living in Canada, following the  9/11 World Trade attacks which caused me and my family to pick up and leave Manhattan, as it was dangerously polluted. Eventually settling in Vancouver, I struck out on my own in a new approach to journalism, by creating my own publication, using the tools of the internet and digital platforms and welcoming the contributions of journalists and writers.

As the CEO of Observer Media Group, I've built strong teams and led those teams to win some of Canada's most prestigious recognitions for outstanding journalism in the public interest, more than sixty to date. Looking forward to Canada's National Observer's tenth birthday in 2025, I'm pleased to see the strength of the publication, and I recognize that our powerful, multimeida platform will provide invaluable journalism for many years to come, despite the many changes I expect to come, both in the journalism industry and in our world.