A Big Award and So Many New Tyee Members!

Word that Tyee senior editor Tyler Olsen had received an important national prize at this year’s Canadian Association of Journalists awards arrived Saturday evening as the ticker for this spring’s Tyee Builder fundraiser climbed.

In a highly competitive field, The Tyee’s Jen St. Denis and Isaac Phan Nay were finalists in two other CAJ award categories for their investigative reporting. And Kristen de Jager, who completed a practicum with The Tyee, was a finalist in the Student Journalism Award of Excellence category for her environmental coverage.

Earlier this summer The Tyee’s Sarah Krichel won this year’s National Newspaper Award for cultural reporting, and Tyee journalists teamed to be finalists in three categories of the Digital Publishing Awards, including General Excellence.

The message is clear. The Tyee’s non-profit, top-notch journalism is only possible because of the growing financial support of our members — the single largest source of Tyee revenue.

And there is still a last chance to help us reach our goal.

Chronicling ‘chaos’ at the local level

Olsen teamed with Kristen Holliday of the Castanet news site to win the Geoffrey Stevens Award for Local Government Reporting for their heavily sourced, blow-by-blow account of a string of controversies attached to Kamloops Mayor Reid Hamer-Jackson. The collaboration, headlined “Mayor of Chaos: How Kamloops Politics Became Infamous,” ran in both The Tyee and Castanet, reaching tens of thousands of readers.

"The years Kristen spent covering Kamloops politics brought tremendous depth, while The Tyee could bring our experience with long stories and a new perspective to a challenging topic," commented Olsen.

Said Tyee editor-in-chief David Beers, “Tyler and Kristen wrote a saga of more than 6,000 words that gripped the attention of readers all the way through, our internal metrics show. That’s a tribute not only to their fact-filled reporting but to the verve with which they told the story.”

Still here and building towards the future

As we shared earlier this month, Beers was chosen to receive the 2026 Digital Publishing Leadership Award, “the highest individual honour the Digital Publishing Awards can bestow,” according to organizers. Judges credited Beers, who founded The Tyee in 2003, for his “legacy of independent, courageous journalism that has helped shape the digital media landscape in Canada.”

In his acceptance remarks delivered on June 5 in Toronto, Beers declared that young citizens, “yearning to escape fear-driven algorithms,” are a natural audience for solutions-focused journalism. He credited “stellar” colleagues for The Tyee’s 23 years of improbable survival, thanking “everyone who ever helped grow The Tyee, and our 10,000 paying members today who ensure we’re still here.”

In recent weeks, many more have joined the ranks of those Builder members during our spring fundraising drive that wrapped up at midnight on Monday. Incredibly, a total of 523 readers signed up or upgraded their contributions, with hundreds more giving one-time contributions — which, incidentally, are tax deductible.

We encourage recurring contributions as it makes it easier to plan and support solid staff positions. Being able to project ahead brings stability to our operations, allowing us to take on ambitious investigations and solutions reporting. These thousands of small contributions make up the majority of our budget and are the best way, we have found, to safeguard our independence and keep our team's focus on publishing original, public interest journalism that you can't find elsewhere.

That said, we very much appreciate all the ways that people contribute to The Tyee, whether that's with a recurring contribution, a one-time payment, volunteering at our events or reading and sharing what we publish.

There’s still time

While our official deadline has passed, we haven’t quite reached our goal of adding a combination of 650 new recurring members plus those who already give but are upping their amount. So, we'll leave our member campaign page live for a few more days, welcoming late contributions.

If you would like to contribute and help us close in on our member goal, you are invited to do so here. Our deepest thanks to all of our Tyee Builder members, new and old, who sustain our non-profit newsroom.