Paul Barnsley was born in Hamilton, Ont. He was a staff writer for the reserve-based Six Nations Tekawennake from 1993-1997 and then moved on to Windspeaker, a nationally-circulated Indigenous-issues monthly news magazine based in Edmonton, where he was the senior writer and national news editor close to 11 years.

In 2007, he accepted the job of creating and managing APTN’s investigative journalism unit, which produces APTN Investigates, a weekly news documentary program that has won close to 50 national media awards. He contributed to a National Newspaper Award-winning project on environmental issues in 2023, and was the first national reporter in Canada to report on missing and murdered women and one of the earlier reporters on the residential schools file. Many of the plaintiffs in the various class actions against Canada that came out of the residential school system have credited his work with keeping the issue alive until the federal government was willing to negotiate a $4 billion settlement agreement with the former students.

Now into his 31st year working in Indigenous-owned media, he has covered stories in close to 400 First Nations in every corner of the country from Tuktoyaktuk, NWT to Burnt Church in New Brunswick. Barnsley was presented with a lifetime achievement award by Journalists for Human Rights in 2016 and has been honored on several occasions by Amnesty International, the Canadian Association of Journalists and the Canadian Screen Academy.

He lives in Sherwood Park, Alberta with his wife Sophie, their cat Stewie and a recently-adopted standard poodle named Darcy. He is very proud of his step-daughter Maude and her one-year-old twin boys.