Finalists chosen for CJF Jackman Excellence Award

The Canadian Journalism Foundation (CJF) has announced its shortlists for the CJF Jackman Awards for Excellence in Journalism, honouring news organizations that embody exemplary journalism and have a profound positive impact on the communities they serve. Finalists are recognized in two categories: large and small media.

The winners in both categories will be announced at the CJF Awards ceremony on June 7 at the Art Gallery of Ontario. For tickets, tables and sponsorship opportunities, visit the CJF Awards page.

The five finalists in the large media category (more than 50 full-time employees) and the stories and/or series shortlisted for the award are:

  • “Clean Water, Broken Promises” Consortium, for “Clean Water, Broken Promises,” a collaborative investigation into water issues in First Nations involving 75 student journalists and more than 125 students, instructors, journalists, editors and producers;
  • Global Newsfor its investigation into widespread sexual misconduct and abuse of power in the most senior ranks of the Canadian military, resulting in what experts have since called a “crisis” of sexual misconduct;
  • Le Devoir, for its investigative series into the deaths of citizens during police interventions over a 20-year period in Quebec;
  • The Globe and Mail, for “Escape from Afghanistan,” a story documenting journalist Mark MacKinnon’s courageous work on the efforts to evacuate Afghan nationals following the fall of Afghanistan;
  • Winnipeg Free Press, for “Life and Death Behind Bars,” an eight-part investigative series into prison conditions at the Stony Mountain Institution, Manitoba’s only federal penitentiary.

The five finalists in the small media category (fewer than 50 full-time employees) and the stories and/or series shortlisted for the award are:

  • IndigiNews, for exposing that government lawyers had told the B.C. government that the controversial practice of birth alerts was “illegal and unconstitutional” months before it stopped the program;
  • Rocky Mountain Outlook, for “Buried in the Aftermath,” a four-part series on how the Association of Canadian Mountain Guides handles avalanche fatalities on guided trips in the Canadian Rockies;
  • Saskatoon StarPhoenixfor “Trapped,” a seven-part series that reveals how government systems are woefully unprepared to help people struggling with substance use;
  • The Narwhal, for Amber Bracken’s first-person photo essay that connected her arrest while covering an Indigenous anti-pipeline protest with broader police violations of journalists’ rights;
  • The Tyeefor its investigation into the Alberta government’s covert efforts to undo decades-old regulations to open up the Rockies’ sensitive eastern slopes to open-pit coal mining.