The Canadian Community Newspaper Awards (CCNAwards) honour outstanding work in editorial, photography, multimedia and overall excellence in community newspaper publishing across the country. Congratulations to the 2024 CCNAwards winners for Outstanding Reporter Initiative!
For a journalist’s initiative to win in this category, it has to be TRULY outstanding. These three winners took their initiative to the next level, demonstrating a real commitment to their communities.
“The entries recognized from this group all took a nugget of information and then put a lot of additional work into expanding and filling out what readers needed to know— and why they needed to know it. There were easily four or five other entries that could have contended for recognition among the top three. Suggestions for those considering entries here in the future? Event coverage can be outstanding, but in and of itself, it rarely requires outstanding initiative. While beats make a great starting point to demonstrate a journalist’s initiative and excellence in dealing with a topic, it’s difficult for a portfolio of beat work to shine brighter than the work that rose to the top from this crop of entries.”
Click the links below to read and explore each of these entries in detail.
First Place: Nunatsiaq News, “Our Home” (four-part series) – David Venn, Gord Howard, Corey Larocque
“An entry that blows past all the others for the effort and initiative taken by this journalist and his supporting newsroom to dig into this past housing program, including visits to communities, and finding people who completed the program and those who would support re-introducing some form of it today. The series provides a linchpin for readers who remember the old program, and those whose search for housing today could benefit.”
Corey Larocque, managing editor for the Nunatsiaq News, submitted the following to support their CCNAwards entry:
In September 2021, Jack Anawak, an Inuk elder and former Nunavut MP, shared a tip with reporter David Venn about several houses in Naujaat, a community of about 1,100 people, that were built in the 1980s. He said the homes were among the best built in Nunavut, a territory where almost two-thirds of its population live in public housing.
Venn sniffed out a solutions-based story that could spark productive conversations around the territory’s housing woes. In October 2022, he travelled to the Kivalliq region. With nothing but a crude hand-drawn map featuring the homes, he went door-to-door asking about these units. He learned of the 1980s Government of the Northwest Territories Homeownership Assistance Program — a success that changed lives by the hundreds — and asked, could it be done again?
Venn put his boots on the ground where few journalists have—Rankin Inlet and Naujaat—and walked the communities in -20 C, overcoming language and cultural barriers, to meet with sources he’d found in phone books or from others in town.
Returning to Iqaluit, he sleuthed through archived government documents worth hundreds of pages, spoke with housing experts, and government officials. Up against a tight production schedule, Venn wrote 10,000 words in 16 days. The final product was a balanced, four-part, 8,000-word feature series with 40 photos, 15 interviews and a special print edition in English and Inuktitut. The solutions-based, narrative-driven “Our Home” ably conveys a bygone housing program’s little-known success and its deficiencies.
Venn’s perseverance and determination led to the kind of series that tested our resources, but ultimately set a new standard for reporting at our paper. Readers praised Nunatsiaq News for its timely, imperative, and compelling reporting. Answering a question about HAP months later, housing minister Lorne Kusugak said the government has been hearing “across the territory” how great “ownership programs used to be” and that NHC is pitching “a new Homeownership Assistance Program 2.0.” Details were released in April 2024.
Second Place: The Lake Report (Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON) – Richard Harley
“A dogged example of follow the money, with a tip of the hat for landing interviews with both the councillor who accepted the envelope of money, the developer who gave it to him, and some of the official response. Entry would have been even better if it included what happened to the money.”
Third Place: The World-Spectator (Moosomin, SK). “Census Numbers” – Kevin Weedmark, Sierra D’Souza Butts
“A worthy example of paying attention to the data, and then chasing down every response (or glaring lack thereof) when the data doesn’t match observed reality.”
