About Capital Daily

Capital Daily

Capital Daily is a Victoria, British Columbia-based local news outlet built around a daily email newsletter. Launched in 2019 by tech entrepreneur Andrew Wilkinson in his hometown, it set out to recreate the local newspaper in digital form — a simple morning newsletter giving residents the day's news highlights. The concept worked: Capital Daily grew to 40,000 readers within its first year and nearly 50,000 subscribers in a city of about 400,000, evolving from a morning digest into an enterprising outlet publishing long-form investigative features. It is the flagship property of Overstory Media Group, the Victoria-based media company Wilkinson co-founded with former Daily Hive editor-in-chief Farhan Mohamed in 2021.

Overview

Capital Daily serves Victoria — British Columbia's capital city, on the southern tip of Vancouver Island — with local journalism delivered primarily through its daily newsletter, supplemented by its capitaldaily.ca website. The newsletter-first model inverts the traditional digital newsroom's priorities: instead of publishing to a website and hoping readers visit, Capital Daily arrives in subscribers' inboxes early each morning, making itself a daily habit. Its coverage spans municipal politics, development, the provincial government (which sits in Victoria), arts and culture, and community life, with an editorial philosophy of stepping back from the day's breaking news to ask how the outlet can meaningfully add to the conversation.

History

Capital Daily was launched in 2019 by Andrew Wilkinson, a multi-millionaire tech entrepreneur and co-founder of Tiny, the Victoria-based technology holding company behind businesses including MetaLab, Dribbble, and WeCommerce. Wilkinson, who has said he always loved the news and wanted to give back to his community, hired a reporter and started a daily newsletter for his hometown. He bought advertising on Facebook and Google, and subscribers poured in. Emailed early each morning, Capital Daily gave residents news highlights from around the city — and within a year it had more than 40,000 readers.

The newsletter's success attracted Farhan Mohamed, who had been editor-in-chief of Daily Hive — then known as Vancity Buzz — and had helped grow that site from a passion project into a fully operating newsroom reaching 6.5 million people monthly across Canada. Mohamed had left Daily Hive and spent a year reflecting on the industry; he concluded he had been "part of the problem" with a media landscape that pushed writers to publish at an unsustainable pace, chasing pageviews and clicks. With Wilkinson, he founded Overstory Media Group (OMG) in 2021 — a company explicitly designed to be a different kind of publisher, choosing quality over quantity with communities at its core.

OMG launched with ten outlets across British Columbia and Alberta — Capital Daily as its flagship — and more than 30 full-time staff. The ambitions were sweeping: the company announced plans to hire 250 journalists and launch 50 new outlets by 2023, with Mohamed as CEO declaring that some of the outlets could become the publications of record in their communities. The business model called for advertising revenue initially, with a membership stream to follow, and the company promised its journalists salaries, benefits, and legal support.

The reality proved more complicated than the launch plans. OMG expanded by acquisition as well as by startup: in April 2022 it bought The Coast, the Halifax weekly, and later that year it acquired The Georgia Straight, the Vancouver weekly, after that paper's previous owner, Media Central Corporation, declared bankruptcy — with roughly a dozen Straight employees fired as OMG took over. The company grew to own 12 publications across three provinces, but its workforce decreased significantly rather than growing toward the promised 250 journalists, and it came under scrutiny for alleged union busting. Editorial staff were expected to integrate artificial intelligence tools into their work. The 50-outlet vision was not realized, but Capital Daily itself endured as the company's founding property and proof of concept.

Content and Editorial Approach

Capital Daily's content covers Victoria comprehensively: city council and the Capital Regional District, the British Columbia legislature — Victoria's unique status as a provincial capital means provincial politics is local news, with the legislature buildings standing at the heart of the city and the premier's decisions felt in Victoria's streets before anywhere else — development and housing, the harbour and waterfront, arts and culture, and community life. Housing and development dominate the local agenda as they do in every growing West Coast city, and the newsletter's treatment of these issues — explanatory, contextual, and skeptical of easy answers — has been central to its appeal. What began as a morning digest of the city's news evolved within two years into enterprising journalism including long-form investigative features, as the outlet hired reporters and gave them room to pursue substantial stories.

The editorial philosophy, articulated by managing editor Jimmy Thomson, is deliberately anti-chase: rather than competing to be first on breaking news, Capital Daily steps back and asks how it can meaningfully add to the conversation. Thomson has described the pitch to prospective journalists as the chance to "write the stories your editor won't let you write" — the deeper, more distinctive work that the pace of conventional digital newsrooms often squeezes out. For readers, the result is a newsletter that feels less like a news wire and more like a knowledgeable friend's briefing on the city.

Coverage and Audience

Capital Daily covers Victoria — a city of about 400,000 in the metropolitan area, and the seat of British Columbia's provincial government — and the surrounding Capital region. Its audience is the engaged Victoria resident: the public servants, tech workers, students, retirees, and civic-minded citizens who make up one of Canada's most politically aware mid-sized cities. With nearly 50,000 subscribers, the newsletter reaches a remarkable share of the city's households — a penetration rate that legacy newspapers in much larger markets would envy, and a testament to the newsletter model's power to build a direct relationship with readers.

The provincial-capital dimension gives Capital Daily's coverage a dual character: it is simultaneously a community newspaper for Victoria and a front-row observer of British Columbia politics, covering the legislature with the proximity that only a Victoria-based newsroom enjoys.

Ownership

Capital Daily is owned by Overstory Media Group, the Victoria-based private media company co-founded in 2021 by Andrew Wilkinson (executive chairman) and Farhan Mohamed. Wilkinson, the tech entrepreneur behind Tiny, provided the founding vision and capital; Mohamed, the former Daily Hive editor-in-chief, provided the publishing leadership. The company's key people have included CEO Glen Clark. OMG's portfolio grew to 12 publications across British Columbia, Alberta, and Nova Scotia, including the flagship Capital Daily, the Burnaby Beacon, and the acquired weeklies The Coast and The Georgia Straight.

Digital Presence

Capital Daily's primary product is its flagship daily email newsletter — the format on which the entire enterprise was built. The newsletter arrives early each morning with the day's essential Victoria news, and its success demonstrated that email, supposedly obsolete as a news medium, could be the foundation of a thriving local outlet. The capitaldaily.ca website extends the newsletter's journalism to the web, hosting articles, investigations, and archives for readers and searchers alike. The outlet maintains the social media presence expected of a digital-native publisher, but the inbox remains its home turf: the direct, unmediated connection to nearly 50,000 loyal subscribers that algorithms cannot take away.

Investigative Podcasting

In January 2023 the outlet launched "Murder on the Island," an investigative podcast by journalist Zander Sherman revisiting the unsolved 2008 murder of Victoria real estate agent Lindsay Buziak — fifteen years after the killing made international headlines.