The Coyotes Savage Pack cheer team from Montreal reacts after winning Level 3 Finals Champions on the last day of the Canadian Cheer Nationals in Niagara Falls, on April 16, 2023. Globe visual journalist Melissa Tait won the Sports Photo award at the National Newspaper Association journalism awards for this photo.Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail
The National Newspaper Awards has named Globe and Mail columnist Doug Saunders journalist of the year for his international affairs reporting documenting the dangerous journeys taken by millions of global migrants.
The Globe was the most decorated publication at this year’s journalism awards, taking home prizes in seven of the 23 categories. Among the winners were Robyn Doolittle and Tom Cardoso for their Secret Canada investigation into the country’s access-to-information system, which won the John Honderich Award for project of the year.
The journalist of the year is selected from among the individual award winners. Mr. Saunders’s work also won the Norman Webster Award for International Reporting.
The Globe and Mail's Doug Saunders was named journalist of the year at the awards for his reporting documenting the journeys taken by millions of global migrants.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
NNA judges said Mr. Saunders, who has written for The Globe for almost 30 years, combined 21st-century tools with an old-fashioned reporter’s instincts to produce a compelling package of interdisciplinary reporting.
“The time, energy, personal risk and extraordinary ingenuity Doug Saunders put into this assignment produced the most detailed and touching portrait of migration on a global scale that our jury has ever seen,” the NNA judges said in a statement.
For their Secret Canada investigation, Ms. Doolittle and Mr. Cardoso spent 18 months analyzing how every government ministry and department across Canada handles Freedom of Information requests. Their work resulted in a first-of-its-kind database that houses completed access requests from across the country. NNA judges called Secret Canada a win for both journalists and democracy.
All The Globe and Mail’s winners and finalists for the 2023 National Newspaper Awards
Other top honours for The Globe, which received 20 nominations, were for explanatory work, politics, sports and news photography, and presentation and design.
“The past year of journalism has been extraordinary, demanding and satisfying,” said Globe and Mail editor-in-chief David Walmsley. “The breadth of the nominations and ultimately the wins at these annual awards provides our teams such validation for the effort and hard work that involved everyone.”
La Presse won prizes in three categories, as did the Toronto Star, which shared one award with The Narwhal. The Narwhal shared another award with IndigiNews, while The Brandon Sun also won two awards.
In total, there were 69 finalists representing 26 news organizations, half of which won at least one award. The prizes were handed out in Toronto on Friday night at the 75th NNA gala ceremony.
Among The Globe’s winners were Ottawa bureau chief Robert Fife and senior parliamentary reporter Steven Chase, who won the John Wesley Dafoe Award for Politics for their months-long investigation into Chinese interference in the 2021 federal election. Their reporting exposed that China employed a sophisticated strategy to disrupt Canadian democracy.
Marcus Gee, a long-time columnist with The Globe, took home his seventh NNA for his explanatory work on fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid that has become the “king of street drugs.”
Globe visual journalist Melissa Tait won the Sports Photo award for the second time. She was recognized for her euphoric photo from the high-energy world of competitive cheerleading.
Family of Mahmoud Al-Said, who was accused of being an ISIS operative, stands next to a wall during a night raid in a village in Syria's Deir ez-Zor region, on April 15, 2023. The Globe’s Goran Tomasevic won in the news category for his image of the family.GORAN TOMASEVIC/The Globe and Mail
Also in photography, The Globe’s Goran Tomasevic won in the news category for an image of the family of an accused Islamic State operative taken during a counterterrorism night raid in the Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor.
In the category of presentation and design, which recognizes visual storytelling, The Globe’s Jeremy Agius was honoured for his portfolio of work on migration routes, Inuit survivors of tuberculosis and the electric vehicle battery business.
The Climate Disaster Project, led by Sean Holman out of the University of Victoria, received the second-ever Special Recognition Citation recognizing exceptional journalism that does not fit into any of the existing NNA categories. Almost 200 journalism and writing students across Canada have been trained to cover climate change and its impact on people through the initiative.
A team from Sing Tao, a Chinese-language publication with offices in Vancouver and Toronto, won the Special Topic Award, becoming the first journalists in the history of the NNAs to be recognized for work in a language other than French or English. Their four-part series, Embracing Canada, looked at the challenges faced by the second wave of immigrants from Hong Kong.