VANCOUVER — Glen Clark, the former premier of British Columbia, is temporarily taking over top duties at Victoria-based media enterprise Overstory Media Group, after CEO and co-founder Farhan Mohamed was moved out of the top job, The Logic has learned.

Mohamed, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, will sit on the company’s board, multiple sources told The Logic.

Clark, who led an NDP government in B.C. from 1996 to 1999, made the announcement to OMG’s senior staff Monday morning in a video meeting. Mohamed did not attend.

Clark, who is a member of OMG’s board, said in the meeting that Mohamed is moving out of day-to-day operations, a source said. The Logic agreed to withhold the sources’ names because they were not authorized to disclose the information. Clark said he does not intend to remain in charge for the long term, but will steer the company through a turnaround, the source said.

Neither OMG nor Clark immediately responded to a request for comment.

Clark had been brought into OMG’s board sometime last fall, one source said, in an effort to oversee Mohamed’s work. He was already an adviser at Tiny, the tech holding company of OMG co-founder Andrew Wilkinson. (Tiny is also an investor in The Logic.)

Founded in 2020 by tech entrepreneur Wilkinson and former Daily Hive editor-in-chief Mohamed, OMG positioned itself as a means to revive the struggling local news industry. Its model centres on operating media brands with an emphasis on email newsletters. Its portfolio of 14 publications includes Capital Daily, The Coast, Vancouver Tech Journal and The Georgia Straight, which it acquired in September 2022.

In 2022, OMG sought to raise $5 million from venture capital at a $25-million valuation as it pushed an aggressive expansion plan. It wanted to run local media outlets in more than 30 markets in North America, touting a lower-cost operating model than legacy media, along with government funding to help woo investors.

But after acquiring The Georgia Straight, OMG began to lay off staff at its publications and, after a round of job cuts in December 2022, admitted financial difficulties. “Over the past year, we’ve gained and continue to gain strong momentum, but there are areas that can’t sustain team members right now,” Mohamed said in a company-wide message shared with The Logic, adding, “We’ve had to make the decision to reallocate some costs towards priorities that will sustain success for all of us going forward.”

The response among staff was one of panic, a source said at the time. Some parts of the business were profitable, but employees weren’t certain what metrics management wanted to hit, or whether runway would be extended to publications that hadn’t yet reached profitability.

In late January 2023, OMG’s Capital Daily reduced its headcount by four people. In a since-deleted statement on OMG’s website, Mohamed said at the time that the company realized at an early January board meeting “that, at our current rate of losses, we only had six months of cash left in the bank. We felt our only recourse was to cut expenses.” 

One of the sources told The Logic that the company’s financial situation appears rosier today. Clark said on the call that Wilkinson isn’t looking for OMG to be a cash cow and the group is close to his goals, the source said, adding that Clark intends to begin his turnaround plan by holding individual conversations with every OMG worker.

Clark, 66, stepped down as B.C. premier in 1999 amid a criminal investigation into the approval of a casino licence for a neighbour who had done free home renovations for Clark. He was acquitted in the case, however, and rebuilt a career as a business executive, starting with the Jim Pattison Group, where he rose to the position of COO before leaving in January 2023. 

Correction: This story has been updated to remove reference to a round of layoffs at The Georgia Straight that were initiated by the publication’s former owner.