4 Expanding the Mission: Special Awards and Fellowships

The creation of the Michener Awards Foundation was borne of tumult in the industry and media executives’ desire to respond to the critique from the Kent Commission report. Deacon and the directors were committed to expanding the Michener mandate into the journalism community through education and outreach. Out of that came the Special Award to recognize an individual for their journalistic contribution and study fellowships for mid-career journalists.

One of the first acts of the new Michener Awards Foundation in 1983 was a special award to recognize journalists who are exemplars when it comes to encouraging and producing journalism in the public interest. At the Foundation’s first annual meeting, Murray Chercover, the president of CTV News Network, pitched the idea. The network was still mourning the loss of its London correspondent Clark Todd , who had been killed two months earlier while covering the civil war in Lebanon.¹ Chercover suggested the Foundation bestow a special award to honour Todd’s journalism.

Foundation president Paul Deacon ran with the idea. It fit with his vision. It sent a clear message that journalism in the public interest was not just stories produced by media outlets; it also involved the highest standard of professional practice or service. At the 1983 awards ceremony, Deacon announced the creation of a Special Award for individuals “whose efforts exemplify the best in public service journalism.”² He went on to say that at the next awards ceremony the first recipient of the special award would be given posthumously to Clark Todd.

Deacon used the platform to praise Todd’s courage, his coverage of conflicts in Poland and Belfast, his many awards for economic reporting, and his documentaries on Eurocommunism and the Pope in Poland. “One of my personal heroes in journalism, the late Kenneth R. Wilson, used to say that our job as journalists was to alert people to the important issues of the day, to give them some understanding of the pros and cons, and let each individual decide what to do about them,” Deacon concluded. “Clark Todd lived that kind of journalism — and died in its service.”³ That was the standard that Deacon set for this new special award.

Tim Kotcheff was head of CTV news at the time. “Clark had an insatiable urge to cover action stories and sometimes he’d go without asking. I was always against that.” This was the case when he flew off to cover a civil war in the hills of Lebanon which Kotcheff described as a local war between Druze and Phalanges militias. “He’s up in the middle of nowhere and they’re shooting each other and he’s in the middle. And he caught one here [Kotcheff points to the heart] and he bled to death over three days and he wrote a letter to his wife saying how much he loved her.” Kotcheff flew to Lebanon and drove into the Chouf Mountains through an artillery barrage to retrieve Todd’s body. “I found it. I had to get it back to London. It was horrific,” he said.⁴

At the awards ceremony in 1984, Todd’s widow, Ann Carmichael Todd, travelled from her home in Hertfordshire, England, to accept the trophy for her husband’s “exceptional contribution to public service and journalism,” from Roland Michener himself. The new trophy, designed by sculptor John Matthews, is a circular bronze disc sitting on a white marble base. One side sports an old typeface that spells out the name of Michener, and the other side has a map of Canada.⁵ This Special Award was smaller and, at three pounds, it was much lighter than the Michener Award trophy.

In those early years, the Special Award did not become a part of the annual Michener Awards ceremony. The award may have been so ‘special’ that nominations from the board were sporadic, even tightfisted. Between 1984 and 2020, only eight individuals were honoured; each had made a unique contribution through exemplary practice or volunteer service to further the Michener values of journalism in the public interest and inspire a new generation of journalists.

In 2009, the board recognized the journalism and service of Clark Davey, who had “worked tirelessly” in newsrooms across Canada and as a founding director with the Michener Awards Foundation. He served as Michener president from 1993 to 1998 and then as executive secretary, a position he held for eighteen years, until 2016. Davey was a shrewd and steadying force for the Michener Foundation, as he had been throughout his career as a reporter in the Parliamentary Press Gallery, as managing editor of the Globe and Mail, and as the publisher of the Vancouver Sun, the Montreal Gazette and the Ottawa Citizen. Many reporters and editors owed their success to Davey’s tough-love mentorship. Heads in the ballroom of Rideau Hall nodded at the 2009 Michener ceremony when the incumbent president David Humphreys said, “Clark Davey’s contribution to investigative journalism is inspirational.”⁶

Over the years, the board also honoured three of its directors — Tim Kotcheff, Alain Guilbert and David Humphreys — with a special award for their exceptional service furthering the mission of the Foundation.⁷ The efforts of the volunteer board members were crucial to the success and survival of the Michener Awards Foundation. They spent countless hours building websites, overseeing the administration, marketing, fundraising and promotion, organizing the awards ceremony and maintaining cordial relations with its patron, the governor general and Rideau Hall, which at times required the skills of a diplomat.

The award was renamed the Michener-Baxter Special Award in 2009 to recognize and honour the contributions of the Baxter family. Clive Baxter was an award-winning journalist with the Financial Post who received the first Michener Award for the 1970 series “The Charter Revolution.” The Baxter family were also generous benefactors, especially in the early years when donors were few and money was tight. His widow Cynthia Baxter served as a Michener director for twelve years. Their son James, a third-generation public affairs journalist and the founding editor and publisher of iPolitics, has served on the Michener Board since 2010. James Baxter recalled how the Michener Award was a big deal in his family. He was about six years old when his father received the Michener Award in 1971. The photograph of his smiling father shaking Roland Michener’s hand “was front and centre in my house for all the years that I was there. I think it’s probably still on my mom’s picture table in a frame. So, I was ready to understand that it was an important and seminal moment in his life, but also an important thing in journalism. So, when I was asked to replace my mother on the board, I was thrilled.” Baxter says he’s trying to “help make journalism in Canada better one step at a time. And I do think everyone involved in the Micheners over the years has had that same goal.”⁸

The Michener-Baxter Special Award was another step in that direction. The laureates are exemplars in journalism. The 2010 posthumous award to Michelle Lang was both inspiring and heartbreaking. Lang was the first Canadian journalist to be killed while covering the operations of Canadian soldiers in Kandahar as part of the Canwest News Service rotation to Afghanistan. The Calgary Herald reporter was with a Canadian military reconstruction convoy on December 30, 2009, when the armoured vehicle she was riding in drove over an improvised explosive device. Lang and four Canadian soldiers died in the explosion.

Governor General Michaëlle Jean recalled with great emotion attending Michelle’s repatriation ceremony at CFB Trenton four months earlier. “Michelle Lang wanted to report on the efforts being made by the Canadian Forces to improve the security of the Afghan people on a daily basis, and to focus on the changes being made as a result of the military presence in this troubled region of the world,” Jean said.⁹ Her parents, Arthur and Sandra Lang of Vancouver, dressed in black, still heavy with grief, walked up to the podium to receive the Michener-Baxter Special Award from Her Excellency. As they returned to their seats, everyone stood and applauded.

While Lang’s posthumous award for her ultimate service to journalism in the public interest was front-page news, the Michener-Baxter Award also was mindful to recognize those behind-the-scenes journalists and editors who work quietly in the service of the Michener values. In 2013, the Michener Awards Foundation honoured Bryan Cantley, a week before he died from pancreatic cancer, for his commitment and outstanding contribution to journalism and the newspaper industry. Cantley was a superhero in the newspaper business.¹⁰ He was respected for his roll-up-the-sleeves and let’s-get-to-work attitude in his service as vice president of the Canadian Newspaper Association, secretary of the National Newspaper Awards and executive director of the Commonwealth Journalists Association. Cantley was too ill to attend the awards ceremony on June 19, 2013, so his close friend, Michener past-president Pierre Bergeron, accepted the award on his behalf from His Excellency Governor General David Johnston. Cantley embodied the Michener Award values that its founder, Roland Michener, and the Foundation saw as fundamental to journalism in the public interest. “He believed in news and the value it brought to a stronger democratic society,” said Scott White, then chair of the National Newspaper Awards and editor-in-chief of The Canadian Press.¹¹

The Michener-Baxter Prize recognized many sides to journalism in the public service. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the vivacious “icon of Canadian journalism”¹² John Fraser received the Michener-Baxter Special Award at a pre-taped fiftieth anniversary ceremony broadcast in December 2020. In an acceptance speech recorded in his living room, Fraser — wearing his signature bow tie — beamed as he looked into the camera and spoke of his beginnings in journalism as a sixteen-year-old copy boy at the Toronto Telegram on Melinda Street.

Unlike many watching the virtual ceremony, Fraser was one of the few journalists who could say that he had spent time with Governor General Roland Michener. He was a young summer reporter with the Evening Telegram in St. John’s in 1968 when he was assigned to cover Michener’s tour of Newfoundland and up the coast of Labrador. Fraser, a self-professed monarchist, described Michener as a “modern model of a governor general, the epitome of what we can do as a country.”¹³

Fraser spent six decades as a “reporter, columnist, editor, ombudsman, academic and benefactor.”¹⁴ In his address, he proudly proclaimed that he’s “still in the game” as the executive chair of the National NewsMedia Council of Canada, “a voluntary, self-regulatory ethics body for the news media industry in Canada” that mediates complaints and promotes ethical practices in the industry.¹⁵ In a reflective moment, Fraser observed how everything seems so changed in the world of journalism from when he was that kid standing beside the pneumatic tube at the Toronto Telegram, but in some ways, it has not changed at all. “It’s just the technology. Some things have simply not changed, and that is the core values in journalism, the ones that I learned a long time ago, the ones that I learned on the streets of Beijing, that I learned in Sherbrooke, Québec, in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Toronto, up North and wherever I got sent, and that is the old cliché — to report without fear or favour.”¹⁶

The Michener-Baxter Special Award was a way to expand the mission of the Foundation beyond an annual awards ceremony. It says that journalism at its best is more than just a job; it is a vocation on behalf of the public. While the industry had an eye for profits, it also cultivated a measure of excellence. Each laureate offers a unique example of what it is to be a role model. The board hoped that the Michener-Baxter winners would inspire journalists to aim high in their professional practice.

Back in 1983, Paul Deacon had his eye on using the awards and the journalism recognized to inspire cub reporters to do more than chase the proverbial fire engine or monitor the police scanner. In the early years, the Michener board organized panel discussions on the day of the awards ceremony with finalists at Carleton’s School of Journalism in Ottawa, but attendance was lacklustre, and without a champion, it fizzled. For a few years, the board recorded the annual ceremony and sent CDs to journalism schools, but the packages often remained unopened. The recording just could not replicate the sparkle and excitement of the live ceremony.

When Adrienne Clarkson became governor general in 1999, she was quick to notice that the Michener Awards invitation list contained a lot of old familiar journalism faces. She insisted that the Foundation invite journalism educators and their students from Carleton University and Algonquin College in Ottawa. It was building capacity among journalism students and recent graduates entering the business. Clarkson eventually expanded the invitation list to journalism schools across the country and her successors continued the practice.

Every year a handful of aspiring senior journalism students and recent graduates in suits and long sparkly dresses walk into Rideau Hall to spend an evening with some of their journalism heroes and to hear inspiring stories about journalism that makes a difference. Ken Ingram had just graduated with a Bachelor of Journalism from the University of King’s College in 2015 when he was invited to the awards ceremony at Rideau Hall. “I imagined the evening as a culmination of outstanding public service in journalism, not one of new beginnings,” recalled Ingram.¹⁷

That night the Globe and Mail won the 2014 Michener Award for a series that resulted in compensation long denied to victims of thalidomide — a drug widely prescribed in the late 1950s and early 1960s for severe morning sickness. The drug company claimed it was safe, but thousands of babies were born with severe physical malformations, and those who grew to adulthood struggled with health challenges.¹⁸ In 2014, the survivors began a campaign with the Globe and Mail to get government compensation.

Editor-in-chief David Walmsley said, “Thalidomide in some ways structurally was a conscious move by me to go after what was a completely non-controversial argument about making change.”¹⁹ But even Walmsley was astounded at the impact. When Ingrid Peritz and Andre Picard were doing the stories, “I didn’t know that the thalidomide stories would create a unanimous decision in the House of Commons. I didn’t know that the Prime Minister himself would move the bureaucracy fast and give the survivors funding. Basically, everything that we could have dreamt of if we’d sat down and created a line item of things we wanted, we achieved, I couldn’t have known any of that.”²⁰ When the winner was announced, the ballroom erupted in applause and gave a standing ovation for Mercédes Benegbi, the executive director of the Thalidomide Victims Association of Canada (TVAC).

It was a night of surprises for many. After the ceremony, Ingram said he was waiting for a taxi when he recognized the star of the evening, Ms. Benegbi. As a good Nova Scotian, “I felt compelled to introduce myself to Mercédes and I exchanged contact information in what felt like a chance encounter. I didn’t anticipate the incredible year that would soon follow,” Ingram recalled.

Something about the sincere young man moved Benegbi. She hired Ingram to create a “behind the scenes” documentary. Ingram said the video project paid tribute to “the Survivors, their journeys, and countless lives affected by this tragedy and triumph in Canadian history.” That chance meeting at Rideau Hall made a huge impact on Ingram. “However minor my role was, it was an honour to be part of such an incredible story.”²¹ Building a culture of public service journalism was what the Michener Foundation was set up to do.

As part of the Michener mission, Deacon was determined to help build a culture of investigative public service journalism among working journalists through study fellowships. For a small, underfunded volunteer organization it was a tall order that would take persistence, time and money.

Financing the Fellowships

In 1983 the critical issue for the new Michener Awards Foundation was all too apparent. If it was to expand its mission beyond the awards ceremony, it needed to build a financial nest egg. Paul Deacon was of the vintage that believed that when you agreed to serve on the board, you pulled your load. He set the gold standard when it came to volunteering.

His son James liked to tell the story of when his parents served on the board of the National Ballet of Canada. “After Rudy Nureyev joined the National, Dad supported a motion requiring all board members to make substantial contributions to help build a set and costumes worthy of Nureyev’s debut staging of Sleeping Beauty. He didn’t have anywhere near the cash, but he knew you couldn’t ask the world’s greatest ballet dancer to fit his sparkling new choreography onto the tattered old set the company had been using for previous productions. So, he and my mother — who years previously had to drag him reluctantly to his first ballet performance — made their contribution by remortgaging the family home.”²² Deacon brought that same commitment to the Michener Foundation in time and money.

Deacon saw his role was to ensure that the mandate of journalism in the public service found full expression in the activities of the new foundation. His vision was to build a culture of service in the profession that went beyond an annual awards night. At the first awards ceremony of the newly formed Michener Awards Foundation in 1983, Deacon announced both the creation of the special award and plans for study fellowships: “In this and other ways, the Foundation seeks to go beyond the annual award to encourage far more Canadian journalists to take an interest in meritorious and disinterested public service journalism.”²³

The idea of study fellowships had been kicking around since the Federation of Press Clubs of Canada passed a motion, ten years earlier, to look into “setting up a major fund to provide a sabbatical or some other recognition of journalistic merit funded by any donor.”²⁴ Nothing happened, but in 1977 minutes show that Ford Canada was interested in funding a $15,000 scholarship for mid-career journalists, but there was no one to champion the idea. Bill MacPherson and Fraser MacDougall had their hands full just keeping the award going. With no budget, no resources and no time to think big, the proposal was put on the back burner.

Before the rise of journalism schools in the 1970s, many journalists learned their craft from older experienced reporters and editors in a guild-like system. Employers provided little in the way of professional training, giving rise to the establishment of professional associations like the Centre for Investigative Journalism in 1978, which offered its members advocacy, training and workshops at annual conferences.²⁵

The formation of the Michener Awards Foundation with a volunteer board and executive revived the discussion of educational opportunities for working journalists. A mid-career sabbatical? A term studying? Whatever the Foundation landed on, Deacon emphasized that these fellowships would take real money. The directors had confidence in Deacon. He was known as a “pioneer of financial journalism” at the Financial Post, and if anyone could do it, Deacon could assemble a powerhouse team to raise the money.²⁶ He threw himself into the presidency with enthusiasm and dedication that would turn around the Foundation’s meagre fortunes.

That first meeting of the new Michener Awards Foundation was a financial reality check. With a bank balance of $4,596.80, the directors quickly turned their attention to the need for some serious fundraising. Deacon proposed a goal of $500,000. If invested, a return of 10 per cent per annum (in 1983) would provide an annual budget of $50,000, enough to cover expenses for the award competition and an education scholarship for a mid-career journalist. The key was getting the right person to chair a fundraising campaign.

The board tossed around names such as Allan Taylor, president of the Royal Bank, Hal Jackman of E-L Financial Corp., and Conrad Black, founder of Hollinger Inc., an investment holding company. In the end, Deacon enlisted Robert J. Wright, a founding partner in Roland Michener’s law firm, Lang, Michener, Cranston, Farquharson & Wright (the firm is now known as McMillan) to chair the first campaign. Wright, a graduate of the University of Toronto Schools, Trinity College at the University of Toronto and Osgoode Hall Law School at York University, knew his way around the monied of Toronto. Wright’s practice included commercial, intellectual property and criminal law.

Meanwhile, the Michener Award Foundation’s bank balance was dwindling as money went to pay for an audit, judging, a new letterhead, stationery and brochures. By April 1984, the treasurer’s report showed a bank balance of $1,858.82. Deacon wrote a personal cheque for $1,000, and MacDougall threw in $200 to cover the costs of the November 1984 ceremony.²⁷ The Foundation closed 1984 with a bank balance of $110.66. A retired Roland Michener came to the rescue by writing a cheque for $2,000 “to help us over the next six months.”²⁸ Donations from Deacon, MacDougall and Michener “helped keep things going for the first two years.”²⁹ Michener continued to support the Foundation through television appearances, interviews, letters to donors and financial contributions. “I don’t ask for money, but I thank people for giving it,” he said.³⁰

When it came to fundraising, Deacon and the board were starting at ground zero. It was a challenging time to be looking for money. The country was just coming out of a severe economic recession that had cut into the advertising revenues of newspapers and broadcasters. In 1983, Statistics Canada recorded prime interest rates of 11.7 per cent, unemployment of 11.8 per cent, and inflation at 5.8 per cent.³¹ As the economy improved, so did the industry’s financial fortunes, though never to the pre-recession profits of 20 per cent or more that some newspapers experienced, and that their shareholders continued to expect. Little did the media barons realize that within twenty years the biggest threat to profitability and its very existence, the Internet, would hobble newspapers by siphoning off classified advertising and readers.³²

A year into the campaign, chair Robert J. Wright wrote that after a series of meetings in Toronto in 1984, “It is clear it will not be possible to raise the kind of money . . . originally contemplated.” He suggested Deacon scale back the $500,000 campaign goal to a modest $50,000 or $60,000 “to properly fund the award side.” Another disappointment was Wright’s advice to Deacon to put sabbaticals for mature journalists on hold. Potential donors, Wright wrote, were not interested in funding a fellowship. Neither was Roland Michener. “I think it’s fair to say that while he has very strong enthusiasm for the continuation of the awards . . . he is not nearly as supportive of the concept of raising a substantial sum of money and granting bursaries or sabbaticals,” Wright wrote. He went on to say that Michener shared the views of other funders “namely, that the primary responsibility for raising monies of this kind should rest on your industry rather than on a general appeal of any kind.”³³

This view became evident to Paul Deacon in a meeting with Beland Honderich, publisher of the Toronto Star and chair of Torstar Corp. Deacon got an “unenthusiastic reception” for the idea of Michener study fellowships.³⁴ The Honderich family and the Star were at the beginning stages of establishing the Atkinson Foundation “to fund a $100,000 year-long fellowship for a Canadian journalist to pursue a research project on a topical public issue.”³⁵ Furthermore, the Michener Awards Foundation was not the only organization raising money to elevate the quality of journalism.

The Canadian Journalism Foundation (CJF) was about to be launched in 1991 by a Toronto-centric group of business, government and media executives with excellent money connections. The CJF vision with its focus on lifetime achievement awards, education and research into journalism ethics was eerily similar to the Michener Awards Foundation. The Michener directors may have been confident of their position as the guardians and promoters of journalism excellence, but they knew that, without money, the award’s status was in jeopardy.

At the 1985 meeting, the board drew up a three-page list of more than sixty potential donors. Banks. Insurance companies. Airlines. Printers. Pulp and paper companies. Broadcasters. Daily and weekly newspaper groups. Magazines. Advertising companies. Foundations. Breweries. Developers.³⁶ With the help of the advertising agency Bertram, Peacock and Bush, Wright crafted a pitch letter for potential donors. The directors set the target of this “one-time” campaign at a more modest $150,000. The pitch letter highlighted the cachet of the Foundation’s founding patron. “Roland Michener, truly one of the most distinguished and well-loved Canadians of our generation, has agreed to associate himself with us in this manner.”³⁷ It also laid the groundwork for the expansion of the Michener mission. Despite the advice of Wright and the obvious reluctance of Roland Michener and the corporate sector, Paul Deacon had included a line that stated one of the goals was to “eventually establish an annual scholarship or fellowship for mature journalists interested in improving the quality of their work in the public service area.”³⁸ Deacon understood far better than Michener that a study fellowship was a grass-roots investment in the future of journalism in the public service. He also knew that the fellowship was contingent on raising enough money.

It must have been a satisfying moment for Deacon at the November 1985 annual meeting to report that the Foundation’s cash flow “is vastly improved over the previous year.” The bank balance of $110 had swelled to $12,000. The campaign was starting to produce results, with another $16,000 pledged for 1986. The good news is exactly what Roland Michener wanted to hear. “We haven’t had to declare bankruptcy,” he said. “It seems to me the award is viable now, and that it will go on.” Deacon attributed much of the campaign’s success to Michener’s strong personal and financial support, to which he replied. “Don’t expect that to stop soon. I have no intention to retire.”³⁹ Michener, eighty-five years old, was good on his word. In the autumn of 1986, he gave the Foundation a donation of $12,000 to be retained as capital for ten years.⁴⁰

Paul Deacon was “anxious to increase the momentum” of the campaign. He arranged a lunch with Roland Michener and John Fisher, chairman of the Southam newspaper chain, who agreed to lead round two of the fundraising campaign. Fisher set up a five-person committee, each with a special assignment: George Currie, founder of accounting firm Coopers and Lybrand and former president of Bowater Corporation, directed corporate projects; Michael Davies, owner and publisher of the Kingston Whig-Standard, the media; Clark Davey, publisher of the Montreal Gazette, corporations; Robert J. Welch, lawyer, politician and Ontario deputy premier in the Bill Davis government, foundations; and Lisa Balfour Bowen, Québec political journalist and art critic, special names.

Balfour Bowen sent the pitch to thirty-seven media, government and businesspeople withstanding in the community. It raised $4,500 from twenty-three individuals, a success rate of 60 per cent. In a memo to John Fisher, she observed that the Michener “isn’t everybody’s favourite charity” as “many donors continue to perceive the Michener as an award for big newspapers — not small magazines and electronic media” and as a result, they had little interest in giving. It was especially evident in francophone Québec, where her appeal to potential donors such as Pierre Trudeau, Paul Demarais, Gerard Pelletier and Claude Ryan was declined or ignored.⁴¹ The lack of interest from potential francophone donors mirrored the paucity of French-language Michener entries and pointed to a need for some serious long-term bridge-building.

Deacon kicked off the fundraising campaign with the announcement that his employer, Maclean-Hunter, would contribute $50,000 — $10,000 a year for five years.⁴² Other media corporations fell in line. By 1987, John Fisher and his team had raised enough money to endow the Michener Award and to cover two annual study fellowships for five years. If the Michener Awards encouraged media organizations to pursue stories in the public interest, the Michener study fellowships, as they were initially called, would be an investment in the education and development of journalists. It was all about building capacity in journalism that creates change to improve the lives of Canadians.

The Michener fellowships were late to the scene. Harvard University had been awarding the Nieman Fellowships since 1938 “to promote and elevate the standards of journalism.”⁴³ The Southam Fellowships at Massey College, started fifteen years earlier, funded mid-career journalists to study at the University of Toronto.⁴⁴ Both these fellowships were competitive and ran an entire academic year. In 1987, the Michener fellowships offered journalists $20,000 for four months away from the newsroom — an academic term — and the opportunity to develop expertise, investigate, and write.

Investigate and Educate

Her Excellency Jeanne Sauvé presented the first two Michener fellowships in 1987 to Moira Farrow, a reporter with the Vancouver Sun, and Roger Bainbridge, an editor at the Kingston Whig-Standard. No two fellowships were the same. Farrow, a visiting scholar at the University of Western Ontario, studied Third World issues. Bainbridge used the time and money to travel and study business magazine models at Harrowsmith and Equinox.

The fellowship winner the following year, Québec journalist George Tombs, interviewed reporters and editors about their ethical knowledge and practice. His findings showed that journalists think about ethics from time to time “but generally don’t have time for it.” He found a home for his research in journalism publications, broadcasts and newspapers such as Le Devoir. “The prestige of the fellowship has given me greater visibility and has allowed me to be more frank in my judgements. I think I can help a broader debate get started, at least in Québec,”⁴⁵ Tombs wrote. In 1995, fellowship winner Sue Rideout revisited the topic. She examined the role culture plays in the ethical decision-making of journalists when it comes to privacy. She concluded that it was “past time” for journalists to learn more when reporting on Canada’s multicultural communities.

Jim Romahn of the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, the 1988 fellow, was no stranger to the Michener Awards. Reporting by the veteran agriculture reporter had garnered the paper two Micheners and two citations of merit.⁴⁶ Romahn spent his term studying at the University of Guelph and wrote articles about the funding and politics surrounding the emerging science of biotechnology. Years before Dolly the sheep, Romahn was learning about cloning and its potential for agriculture. “For example, Dr. Bob Stubbings told how he’s taking eggs from unborn calves, fertilizing them in a test tube to create embryos and transplanting the embryos into dairy cows; when he perfects the technique, the purebred cattle industry will probably die because there will be no market left for anything but the absolute best — i.e., only one bull and one cow in 100,000 will be genetic parents.”⁴⁷ The time and money from the fellowship gave journalists like Tombs, Rideout and Romahn a chance to deepen their knowledge and reflect on their day-to-day practices, which was reflected in the journalism they produced.

The recipients cast a wide net and produced original research and articles of interest and value to audiences. The fellowship allowed internationally focused journalists to study politics in countries such as Italy, the Soviet Union, Catalonia and Slovenia, and human rights in Southeast Asia. Some fellows photographed people and landscapes ravaged by developers and acts of nature.⁴⁸ Others looked at the roles of Canadian institutions such as the public broadcaster,⁴⁹ the federal public service⁵⁰ and the developing ethical relationship between universities and drug companies.⁵¹ In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the fellowship bought time to write books that ranged from the history of investigative journalism to genetics and web porn.⁵² Many of the investigations are stories that continue to make headlines, such as the crisis in children’s mental health⁵³ and Canadian aid to Afghanistan.⁵⁴

For working journalists, the fellowship proved to be “an exceptional moment”⁵⁵ in their careers. Jean-Pierre Rogel, the 1998 Investigative Fellow, said that the four months this award gave him away from the pressures of daily reporting allowed him to learn and write a book, La Grande Saga des Genes, about human genetics. “I would not have been able to write this book without this award. I now have a more profound concept of science and a renewed interest towards journalism,” he wrote in his report. “At a time when newsrooms are being downsized and budgets cut, this fellowship allows journalists to continue the tradition of investigating subjects that need to be written about.” The fellowships would evolve to meet the changing needs of journalism and the industry.

Incubating and Reinventing Journalism

For the first twenty-five years of the study fellowship program, the Foundation supported individual journalists to build specialty expertise and produce investigative stories. While that was still important, in 2012 the board recognized that journalism education was an untapped area that could help to encourage a culture of public service journalism among students.

Alongside the fellowship for investigative reporting, a second one with an education focus allowed experienced journalists to partner with a university to research and teach cutting-edge newsroom developments in journalism schools. This expansion gave scope for mid-career journalists to reflect on and even intervene through their research and teaching on the state of their industry.

The first 2012 Michener-Deacon fellow, Melanie Coulson, a senior editor at the Ottawa Citizen, conducted research about community newsrooms and citizen journalism, and she taught a multimedia journalism class to third-year undergraduates. “I fully submerged myself in a community that means so much to me: at Carleton’s journalism school, with students who will be on the vanguard of change in our industry,” she wrote.⁵⁶ In subsequent years other recipients developed courses in entrepreneurial journalism, big data and social media for journalism students.⁵⁷

Matthew Pearson remembers the muggy June night in 2017 when he received the fellowship. Pearson, a municipal reporter and editor at the Ottawa Citizen, proposed developing an education module for students and journalists about trauma and journalism. He was surprised by what happened at the reception. “Almost immediately I was being taken aside by journalists and hearing their stories and hearing them say, we’ve never talked about this, there’s no support for this and getting the sense that wow, this is something that is needed.”⁵⁸ The fellowship acknowledged it was time for journalists to shine the spotlight on themselves. In the performance of their public interest role, journalists were becoming burned out. They were also becoming targets for threats, harassment and verbal abuse. They needed one of their own to step back, give them advice and arm up-and-coming journalists.

The fellowship led Pearson out of day-to-day reporting at the Ottawa Citizen and into the classroom. He says the time to step back gave him a research agenda and was the “springboard” to a tenure-track teaching job at Carleton’s School of Journalism in 2021. “The fellowship opened my eyes to research in a journalistic space and allowed me to see how I could expand my horizons through research that is still connected to and informed by journalistic practice in Canada. And it’s really exciting,” Pearson said. “I would not be where I am today if it weren’t for that fellowship because I wouldn’t have had that initial taste.” The work he did as a Michener fellow became a “launch pad” for his latest research project, “Taking Care,” “the first of its kind and national research survey on mental health, wellbeing and trauma in Canadian journalism.”⁵⁹

Pearson’s Michener certificate is on his office wall at Carleton for students to see. “My degrees aren’t there, but the Michener one is, and I do recognize that that was such a turning point in my professional life and, and really helped me see that there was a different avenue to explore in journalism that is still quite powerful because it is a really hard thing to leave a job as a practising journalist. Many of us love our work. And this allowed me to see how I could do both.”⁶⁰

The second fellowship in education also opened doors for journalists to develop new models for practising journalism in the public interest. In 2015, Toronto Star reporter Rob Cribb used his fellowship to create the framework for a National Investigative Reporting Project, a network of journalism schools that harnesses the energy and enthusiasm of students to work with media outlets on in-depth stories of national public interest. It was something that had never been done before in Canada. Cribb’s vision was to give young reporters “the unique experience of contributing to ambitious, aggressive journalism alongside seasoned professionals. And media organizations who take part are distinguished by the stories, the resulting public debate and the opportunity to see emerging young talent up close.”⁶¹

Cribb says the genesis of the idea came from his teaching at Ryerson University (renamed Toronto Metropolitan University in 2022). He found it impossible to finish student projects in twelve weeks because “investigations don’t work on an academic timeline.” There was no mechanism to move them forward. At the time, newspaper editors were not interested in student work that needed more fact-checking and interviews and could be fraught with potential legal problems.

For Cribb, that changed in 2011. The work that his class did was too important to let moulder. Their investigation into academic “credit mills” at private for-a-fee provincially licensed schools revealed, “a two-tiered education system that allowed those with the lowest grades to get the highest grades and get scholarships.”⁶² So when the term ended, Cribb worked nights and weekends checking facts, doing more interviews and hiring students to help. In September, the Toronto Star published the first of the series: “Cash for marks gets kids into university.”⁶³ Cribb said it was an experiment with moving an in-depth piece from the classroom into the newsroom and then onto the front page.

“It was dynamite.” There was an investigation, and the students saw their bylines on the front page of Canada’s largest circulation newspaper. Cribb spent the next four years refining the Ryerson-Toronto Star collaborative model and went into his Michener-Deacon fellowship, convinced it could be scaled up to involve other journalism schools and media partners across the country.

The following year, Patti Sonntag, the newly appointed “journalist in residence” at Concordia University in Montreal, used her 2016 fellowship to test drive a prototype of Cribb’s model. Students and professors from four universities and journalists from the Toronto Star, National Observer and Global News teamed up to produce the series “The Price of Oil.”⁶⁴ In a series of stories in various media, they documented toxic emissions from oil and gas facilities in Saskatchewan and Ontario.

Buoyed by that success, Concordia University created the Institute for Investigative Journalism (IIJ) with a founding grant from the Rossy Family Foundation and named Patti Sonntag its first director.⁶⁵ The IIJ was a consortium of newsrooms and universities based at Concordia University in Montreal, Québec, modelled on a blueprint Cribb developed as a Michener fellow in 2015.

The IIJ’s first project led by Sonntag and Cribb, “Tainted Water,” involved 120 people — journalism students and faculty from nine post-secondary institutions and journalists from six media outlets: Global News, Le Devoir, the Toronto Star, the Star Halifax/ Vancouver/ Calgary/ Edmonton, the Regina Leader-Post and the National Observer. The series took an in-depth look at lead and other contaminants in drinking water. “What we found is that Montreal, Gatineau, Saskatoon, Regina, Moose Jaw and Prince Rupert had lead levels comparable or higher than those of Flint, Michigan, during its 2015 lead crisis,”⁶⁶ Sonntag said.

The series racked up a string of awards, including a nomination for the 2019 Michener Award, the first non-traditional media outlet ever to receive a nomination. “Tainted Water had swift impact, with Canada-wide commitments to replace lead pipes and test water more rigorously. More importantly, it represents a new way forward; a new way to produce great public-service journalism,” noted the Michener Awards Foundation news release.⁶⁷ “It was amazing,” Cribb said, his eyes sparkling. “We just gave birth to this thing. And the first project is . . . is magical.” The success led to subsequent investigations into drinking water on Indigenous reserves and, when COVID-19 hit, “Project Pandemic.”

Cribb has taken the model one step further with his Toronto-based Investigative Journalism Bureau (IJB) at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto (2020).⁶⁸ Young journalists, media outlets, law students and academic experts from multiple universities work together in what Cribb says is an independent non-profit newsroom. Cribb credits his fellowship for the success of the IJB and its inaugural project, “Generation Distress”— an investigation into rising anxiety, depression, suicidal ideas and self-harm among young people.⁶⁹