Each year, Caldwell Partners International chooses 40 Canadians who were under 40 in the past year to honour for their outstanding achievements. Click here to learn more about the program, and find more winners in the list below.
Leonard Brody says he enjoys supporting “passionistas” – people with community-based interests or passions that they want to share – through his work as president of Clarity Digital Group, and its website examiner.com.
“Passionate about recycling, about fishing or mountain biking or cooking. What we do is about passionistas, not about breaking news.”
Clarity Digital Group, owned by the Anschutz Company, a Denver-based investment firm that concentrates on sports and entertainment, produces “pure play internet properties” like examiner.com – a media and information source that is currently in 245 markets across the United States and Canada.
“It’s kind of like the reinvention of local news, in a way. It is a huge network of trusted insiders in local markets that talk about the things they are passionate about,” he said.
Examiner.com employs 70,000 of these local journalists, and the local sites attract roughly 20-25 million unique hits a month, making it a Top 100 website in North America.
“The mandate was to re-energize and reinvent the North American town square, to connect people who are like-minded and passionate about the things they care about in their communities with others,” Mr. Brody said. “The focus for now is to stay on North America. There is so much ground to cover here. ... It doesn’t mean it won’t change down the road, but for the foreseeable future that’s what we’re doing.”
Mr. Brody said he tends to “live on an airplane” and has a lovely and patient girlfriend. He is at his home in Vancouver about two days a week, to visit family and friends, and has a flight path that takes him through Denver, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and London the rest of the time.
Mr. Brody’s own “passionista” tendencies go toward angel investment, and he is a proud shareholder of Coventry City Football Club, an English soccer team.
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