Michener Awards Foundation announces its 2024 fellowships winners

OTTAWA, ON, April 25, 2024 /CNW/ - The Michener Awards Foundation today announced its Michener-Deacon Fellowship has been awarded to Ève Lévesque and Marie-Christine Noël, who will lead an investigation into food security in Canada for L'Actualité. The Michener-L. Richard O'Hagan Fellowship goes to Jean-Hugues Roy and Naël Shiab to create a free online course on data journalism.

Each of these fellowships is worth $40,000 plus $5,000 in expenses.

The Michener-Deacon investigative project will seek to answer one important question: How is it that thousands of Canadians, even though they have a job and live in a prosperous country, are turning to food banks to feed their families? The investigation will look at the socio-economic mechanisms and public policies that threaten food security. But primarily it will be carried out with people on the front lines of the crisis: those who work while struggling to feed themselves. The jury was won over by the urgency of this issue and its public-interest dimension.

The Michener-L. Richard O'Hagan Fellowship for Journalism Education will support the creation of a bilingual course on data journalism, offered free online. The course "Code Like a Journalist" will train journalists in techniques that allow them to tap into massive databases, collect relevant information, analyze the information, and make it visible and understandable to the general public. The project caught the attention of the jury because data journalism is a tool that is being increasingly embraced by journalists, and because it will help serve the public interest in the world of mass data and algorithms.

The Michener fellowship recipients will be honoured at the annual Michener Awards ceremony at Rideau Hall on Friday, June 14, 2024, hosted by the Governor General of Canada. This event unveils the winner of the Michener Award for public service journalism in Canada. Finalists for the 2023 Michener Award will be announced next week.

The Michener-Deacon Investigative Journalism fellowship, supported by TD Bank Group, allows a journalist to devote up to four months for a reporting project. Applicants are required to undertake a project that aspires to the criteria of the annual Michener Award for journalism with its emphasis on making an impact for the public good.

The Michener-L. Richard O'Hagan Fellowship for Journalism Education, supported by BMO, is dedicated to the advancement and enrichment of the education of Canadian journalists and journalism students. Winning projects are designed to expand the knowledge of newsroom products, processes and practices.

Judges for the 2024 Michener Fellowships:

• Geneviève Rossier (Chair), Directrice générale, CN2I;
• Maxime Bertrand, Director, Community Relations and Journalistic Standards, Radio-Canada;
• Raymond Brassard, former Executive Editor of the Montreal Gazette and Editorial Consultant at the National Newspaper Awards;
• Vivian Smith, PhD, Editorial consultant, former Globe and Mail journalist and university journalism instructor, author of Outsiders Still (U of T Press).
• Pierre-Paul Noreau, past president of the Michener Awards Foundation, chair of the Quebec Press Council

SOURCE Michener Awards Foundation