A letter from Jimmy Thomson on impact

As a subscriber, you power our reporting. As editor-in-chief, I believe you have a right to know how we’ve spent your dollars. But how to quantify impact when so much of what we do happens inside the minds of the people we reach? 

Let me give you some numbers:

Donate so the Climate Solutions Reporting Project can go further in 2026. 

Let me tell you about the things we know happened as a result of our work.

I can tell you about our impact on other media — a sort of proxy for how far the word travels when we find something important. 

Our stories inspired coverage this year in national media such as CBC’s The Current, which followed Marc Fawcett-Atkinson’s reporting on wildfire conspiracy theories.

Natasha Bulowski’s reporting was cited in The New York Times’ coverage of the Canadian election. Rory White was invited to become a regular columnist on a major TV network, to be announced. 

Mother Jones Magazine republished stories by Darius Snieckus, Sonal Gupta, Matin Sarfraz and John Woodside. 

Major media figures read, responded to and shared our stories. Here’s a note we got from Naomi Klein, for instance: "Thanks for all of your great work reporting on Peterson and Smith and the whole oily gang."

Beyond our reporting, one tool we’ve built — Civic Searchlight — has reached hundreds of journalists, academics, public officials and activists, helping them follow developments and find patterns in local government across Canada. 

I could also highlight the sheer breadth of the places we went, as a way of explaining both what’s behind our reporting and how much we value getting the story right. 

Our reporters touched three Canadian coasts this year and even ended up on foreign shores. From Bamfield, BC to Trenton, NS, to Churchill, Man., we criss-crossed the country in search of........

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