The National Media Awards Foundation is delighted to announce that Emma Gilchrist, the co-founder of The Narwhal, is the recipient of the 2025 Digital Publishing Leadership Award, which is the highest individual honour the Digital Publishing Awards can bestow.
Biography by Carol Linnitt
Co-founder, The Narwhal
The online media landscape in Canada presents much like the country’s material landscape: spread out, sparsely populated. While some might find those circumstances lonely, even daunting, Emma Gilchrist saw only opportunity and room to grow.
Emma is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Narwhal, a distinctly Canadian, award-winning online magazine that tells in-depth, original and investigative stories about the natural world.
Emma’s journalism career and achievements
Emma grew up in the small town of Valleyview, Alberta, where she learned firsthand the complicated relationship communities often have with resource development. Her journalism career began at Mount Royal University in Calgary, where she graduated with a Bachelor’s of Applied Communications (Journalism) in 2006.
During her time at Mount Royal, she did a work term at a weekly newspaper in the UK where Emma gained valuable perspective on the particularities of Canada’s media culture and professional expectations surrounding the role journalists ought to play in advocating for the public interest.
After returning to Canada, she worked as a copy editor at both the Calgary Sun and the Calgary Herald. During her time at the Herald, Emma spearheaded an award-winning online guide called the Green Guide, which won both an Alberta Emerald Award and a Canadian Newspaper Association Great Ideas Award for online innovation.
In 2013, Emma took on a leadership role at the non-profit site DeSmog Canada, an independent publication reporting on Canada’s energy and environment. During her time at DeSmog Canada, now The Narwhal, Emma led a small team of journalists that produced innovative, investigative and in-depth journalism on natural resource development. Between 2014 and 2018, Emma shepherded DeSmog Canada through major reporting projects, including several investigative scoops on B.C.’s Site C hydroelectric dam and the Trans Mountain pipeline, which triggered follow-up coverage from Canada’s national media outlets.
Over the years, Emma developed an unflappable sense of public interest journalism. When reporting on matters of the environment in Canada, it is easy to fall into simplistic binaries of ‘for or against,’ or superficial ‘he-said-she-said’ storytelling. Emma’s reporting and editorial leadership is characterized by a sustained desire to tell richer stories that add context, aid public conversations and dispel myths. Much of Emma’s work is contoured by a deeply held principle that good journalism helps the public move past polarizing and reductive tropes and toward a more nuanced understanding of issues, informing more constructive public conversations and decision-making.
In 2015 Emma was granted an Alumni Achievement Award by Mount Royal University for her contributions to public interest journalism and in 2017 Emma was recognized by Canada’s Clean50 for building a “powerhouse environmental investigative journalism outlet.”
At a Pecha Kucha event in Vancouver in 2015 Emma detailed the very personal story of her pathway into investigative journalism. As an adopted child, Emma struggled through her teen years with gaining access to information about her birth parents. Facing that intimate crucible as a young woman in part developed Emma’s ongoing passion for investigation, for holding governments accountable and defending the public’s right to know. “It got me really fired up about injustice, about powerful people who abuse the trust we place in them,” Emma told the Pecha Kucha audience, “and it really made me want to go out and make the world a fairer place.”
Key to Emma’s vision for investigative, public interest journalism in Canada is the idea of people-powered media. As DeSmog Canada continued to grow in its reach and influence, Emma began to dream of a bolder publication tailor-made to suit the needs of Canadians who care about the natural world.
The rise of The Narwhal
This abiding sense — that Canadians not only needed but deserved more robust and honest environmental journalism — led Emma to co-found The Narwhal in 2018.
Since its launch, The Narwhal has received dozens of national awards recognizing its investigative journalism, photojournalism and visually compelling design.
The Narwhal is the result of not just a vision for a sophisticated online magazine but a reimagining of Canadians’ relationships with the journalists who serve them. The reinvigoration of the relationship lies at the heart of The Narwhal’s reader-funded model.
Since The Narwhal’s launch, Emma has emerged as a thought leader in the field of non-profit journalism, advocating for the importance of reader-funded and philanthropic revenue models for news. Her interventions in the larger public conversation around the role of the media have focused on a need for Canada to recognize journalism as a public good as well as the responsibility of journalists to reflect more complexity in their stories, especially when reporting on polarizing issues. Emma was the founding chair of Press Forward, an organization created to “unify, elevate and advocate for independent media organizations and work to strengthen innovation, inclusivity and diversity in media across the country.”
As executive director and editor-in-chief, Emma’s role — most visibly preoccupied with providing original, in-depth environmental journalism to Canadian readers — is paired with another less-visible, less-glamorous task: running a non-profit digital news startup in an anemic media environment.
Emma understood that the work of nurturing a fledgling environmental publication in Canada is, more fundamentally, the work of reigniting the stilted relationship between readers and journalists. But a mere passion for public interest journalism isn’t sufficient to rekindle and repair the alienation of media consumers and media outlets. You need refined philosophical reflections paired with technological and logistical gumption. Emma has these skills and assets in droves.
Emma’s dream for The Narwhal was to create a media outlet and brand that Canadians who care about the environment would not only want to support, but belong to. In the process of crafting and then launching this publication, Emma spearheaded incisive research on Canadian media consumption habits and launched province-by-province Google surveys. She hired pollsters to mine nearly 2,000 British Columbians for a cross-section of environmental values, political beliefs, news consumption and gut reactions to media brands both real and fictive.
Emma harnessed these insights in her work with brand and design consultants to create a publication that looks and feels distinctly Canadian, while not being divisively patriotic, colonial or feeding polarization over energy and environment politics. Emma also researched various digital solutions to host the records of hundreds of thousands of readers, process their donations, manage their membership records and integrate with email systems.
Since 2018, The Narwhal has successfully gained the support of more than 7,000 paying members despite having no paywall and no subscriber-exclusive content. This makes The Narwhal’s membership program one of the most successful in the country.
By the end of 2020, Emma was reflecting on the rapid growth of The Narwhal’s membership model in western Canada — a model premised upon providing all of our journalism for free, but convincing a certain percentage of readers to voluntarily pay what they can each month to support the work. Emma created a hypothesis that with a three-year runway, The Narwhal could launch a bureau in Ontario and sustain it through membership contributions by the fourth year. If the organization could do this, she knew she’d have cracked the code for replicating The Narwhal’s model across different geographies.
After rallying the support of three foundations, Emma and The Narwhal team set out to launch the Ontario bureau in late 2021. Within three years, not only had Emma’s membership projections come true, but The Narwhal’s team had also earned a Michener Award for its investigative reporting in collaboration with the Toronto Star on the Greenbelt scandal. The success of Emma’s formula in Ontario was recognized by the Canadian Journalism Foundation, which granted The Narwhal with the CJF-Meta Journalism Project Digital News Innovation Award, a $10,000 prize, in June of 2023.
“In the media space, we often think of innovation as content-focused or editorial-focused. But the revenue piece is one of the most crucial issues the industry must address,” jury member and digital journalist Lisa Yeung said. “The Narwhal’s project was uniquely revenue-focused among the entries and was creative and strategic in its approach to the question all outlets must address if we want to prioritize innovation: How are we funding this?”
In addition to her fundraising finesse, Emma is a talented writer and journalist in her own right, winning a National Magazine Award in 2021 for a longform personal feature on her 35-year journey piecing together her biological origins. In 2022, she won a National Newspaper Award for best long feature for a harrowing piece of personal journalism on the heartbreaking reality of terminating a pregnancy for medical reasons.
Amidst the exponential growth of The Narwhal and her own personal loss, Emma also navigated the 2021 arrest of photojournalist Amber Bracken, who was on assignment for The Narwhal reporting on the conflict surrounding the Coastal GasLink pipeline in Wet’suwet’en territory when the RCMP took her into custody for three days. Whereas many organizations have stopped at having their reporters released, under Emma’s leadership The Narwhal went a step further and sued the RCMP for wrongful arrest and breaching the Charter rights of both Amber Bracken and The Narwhal. This bold and costly lawsuit has the potential to substantially contribute to press freedoms in Canada and hold the nation’s most powerful police force accountable for infringement of media Charter rights.
In the past seven years, Emma has grown The Narwhal’s staff from four to 28 and the publication’s revenue from $400,000 to just shy of $4 million, all while leading a team that has produced the most critical environmental journalism in the nation. The Narwhal is unlike any other publication in Canada, thanks almost exclusively to the leadership of Emma Gilchrist, who has the ambition and ability to do the difficult calculus of achieving lots with very little.
Mark your calendars for tomorrow, May 6, at 11:00 a.m. EDT, as we reveal the finalists for the 10th annual Digital Publishing Awards!