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 News, for 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 StarPhoenix, for “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 Tyee, for 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.
