Globe and Mail and Toronto Star share top honours at 2013 National Newspaper Awards

CHARLOTTETOWN, May 30, 2014 /CNW/ - The Toronto Star and Globe and Mail each won five awards while Michèle Ouimet of La Presse won two individual honours Friday as the National Newspaper Awards were handed out for the 65th time.

Ouimet won in the Columns category and shared top spot with La Presse colleague Agnès Gruda in the International category. Ouimet has now won six NNAs in her career, one shy of the record seven won previously by Serge Chapleau of La Presse, Stephanie Nolen of the Globe and Mail and Roy Peterson of the Vancouver Sun. Four other journalists have also won six awards since the competition began in 1949.

The National Newspaper Awards are open to daily newspapers, news agencies and online news sites approved for entry by the NNA Board of Governors. Sixty-nine finalists were nominated in 22 categories, selected from 1,206 entries published in 2013. Of 57 organizations to submit entries, 22 had nominations for the prestigious awards.

The Toronto Star's five wins came for Project of the Year and Multimedia Feature (team entries), Arts and Entertainment (Linda Barnard), Explanatory Work (Amy Dempsey) and Long Feature (Don Gillmor).

The Globe and Mail's wins came in Business (team entry), Beat Reporting (Dakshana Bascaramurty), Short Feature (Grant Robertson), Presentation (Jason Chiu) and News Feature Photo (Moe Doiron).

The Calgary Herald won two awards on its own – Breaking News (team entry) and Feature Photo (Leah Hennel) – and teamed up with the Edmonton Journal to win in the Investigations category (team entry). The Journal also won in the News Photo category (Shaughn Butts).

Single awards went to the Canadian Press (Politics), Edmonton Sun (Sports Photo), Halifax Chronicle-Herald (Editorial Cartooning), New Brunswick Telegraph Journal (Local Reporting), Waterloo Region Record (Editorials) and Winnipeg Free Press (Sports).

The winners were announced at an awards ceremony Friday night. Winners received cheques for $1,000 and a certificate of award. Other finalists received citations of merit.

Here is a list of the winners and finalists:

Arts and Entertainment
WINNER: Linda Barnard, Toronto Star, for a story about Edmonton filmmaker Michael Jorgensen, a review of Woody Allen's film Blue Jasmine, and a feature about the making of the film Empire of Dirt
FINALISTS: James Adams, Globe and Mail, for two stories about the world of visual art (including one that explored an intriguing quest to authenticate a painting) and a review of the film Inside Llewyn Davis; Ian Brown, Globe and Mail, for an interview with Mikhail Baryshnikov, a profile of an artist who works in the 150-year-old "plein air" tradition, and a feature about the problem of judging photography in an age where cameras are ubiquitous

Beat Reporting
WINNER: Dakshana Bascaramurty, Globe and Mail, for coverage of the suburban communities surrounding Toronto
FINALISTS: Tom Blackwell, National Post, for coverage of the health beat; Charlie Fidelman, Montreal Gazette, for coverage of the health beat

Breaking News
WINNER: Calgary Herald team for coverage of floods that swept across southern Alberta
FINALISTS: Montreal La Presse team for coverage of the massive explosion caused by a runaway train in Lac-Mégantic, Que.; Ottawa Citizen team for coverage of a collision between a double-decker city bus and a VIA passenger train that left six people dead

Business
WINNER: Globe and Mail team for in-depth analysis of the rapid decline of BlackBerry maker Research in Motion from a global technology leader to a company struggling to stay alive
FINALISTS: James Bagnall, Ottawa Citizen, for an investigation revealing how a building tradesman and accused fraudster was also a CSIS informant; Bill Redekop, Winnipeg Free Press, for a two-part series on the rise and fall of an Internet pharmacy venture

Columns
WINNER: Michèle Ouimet, Montreal La Presse, for three columns on a proposed charter of values that deeply divided the province of Quebec
FINALISTS: Luisa D'Amato, Waterloo Region Record, for columns on an inquest into the death of an inmate, plans for a local casino, and the shenanigans of school board trustees; Royson James, Toronto Star, for columns on violence within the city's black community, the police shooting of a man on a city bus, and the challenge facing Toronto voters in the next mayoral election

Editorial Cartooning
WINNER: Bruce MacKinnon, Halifax Chronicle Herald
FINALISTS: Serge Chapleau, Montreal La Presse; Brian Gable, Globe and Mail

Editorials
WINNER: John Roe, Waterloo Region Record
FINALISTS: Tony Keller, Globe and Mail; André Pratte, Montreal La Presse

Explanatory Work
WINNER: Amy Dempsey, Toronto Star, for using the case of a mentally ill man who killed a Toronto police sergeant with a stolen snowplow to explain what it takes, and what it means, for someone to be found neither guilty nor innocent in the eyes of the law
FINALISTS: John Allemang, Globe and Mail, for a piece exploring the pleasures, and the pleasurable pain, crossword puzzles have given to newspaper readers every day for a century; Claire Brownell, Windsor Star, for exposing just how much of her city belongs to the billionaire owner of the Ambassador Bridge, who has been buying and boarding up properties in hopes of building a new bridge to Detroit; Wendy Gillis, Toronto Star, for a report breaking down the complex task of cleaning up the urban oil spill caused by the Lac-Mégantic train disaster

Feature Photo
WINNER: Leah Hennel, Calgary Herald, for a balletic image of a woman leaping over a huge street-corner puddle into the arms of her husband
FINALISTS: Tyler Anderson, National Post, for a photo of a fan being grabbed by security guards as he slides down a stadium wall beside a giant camera ad; Mark Blinch, Reuters, for a picture of a man and woman talking between a barrier that divided men's and women's prayer areas inside a mosque

International
WINNER: Michèle Ouimet and Agnès Gruda, Montreal La Presse, for an examination of Salafists, Islamist militants working to foment revolution and violence in Libya, Tunisia and Syria
FINALISTS: Mark MacKinnon and Marina Strauss, Globe and Mail, for a report exploring the misery and exploitation that brings clothes from sweatshops in Bangladesh to store shelves in Canada; Michelle Shephard, Tonda MacCharles, Andrew Livingstone and Laurent Prieur, Toronto Star, for an investigation into issues surrounding two Canadians who had been lured by Al Qaeda-inspired groups with the promise of jihad in Africa's so-called "Arc of Instability"

Investigations
WINNER: Karen Kleiss, Darcy Henton, Stephanie Coombs, Darren Francey and Paula Simons, Calgary Herald/Edmonton Journal, for an investigation spanning four years that produced stunning revelations about the deaths of children in Alberta's foster care system
FINALISTS: Adrian Humphreys, National Post, for a report exposing the attempts of a mysterious facilitator, working outside normal channels and using unconventional methods, to deport long-term illegal immigrants to Iran, South Africa, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Guinea and Cameroon; Vincent Larouche and David Santerre, Montreal La Presse, for uncovering a crime network that funneled hundreds of Roma from Romania, as well as some impostors, into Canada

Local Reporting
WINNER: New Brunswick Telegraph Journal team for extensive reporting on the investigation into the slaying of prominent business executive Richard Oland
FINALISTS: Dan Dakin, St. Catharines Standard, for a three-part investigative series on a failed private football school in Niagara; Ian Hitchen, Brandon Sun, for coverage of allegations that children in a close-knit Manitoba Old Order Mennonite community had been physically abused, some with a cattle prod; Grant LaFleche, St. Catharines Standard, for a series exploring the deaths of at least 126 workers during the building of the Welland Canal a century ago

Long Feature
WINNER: Don Gillmor, Toronto Star, for "Losing David," an intensely personal story about coming to grips with the suicide of a loved one
FINALISTS: Jim Coyle, Toronto Star, for "The Wreck I Was," a searing first-person account of an alcoholic's descent into booze and hard-won recovery; Jon Wells, Hamilton Spectator, for "Life and Death in the ICU," a feature that took readers into the heart of one of Canada's busiest intensive-care units for trauma, cardiac and neurological treatment

Multimedia Feature
WINNER: Toronto Star team for "Known to Police," about the intersection of policing practices and race in Canada's biggest city
FINALISTS: Montreal La Presse team for "Ces Routes Qui Tuent," about the troubling and often fatal impact of unsafe roads in Quebec; Don McArthur, Craig Pearson, Trevor Wilhelm and Dan Janisse, Windsor Star, for "The Way of the Gun," about a police operation that brought down a gun smuggling ring

News Feature Photo
WINNER: Moe Doiron, Globe and Mail, for a picture of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford sitting alone in council chambers, wearing a Toronto Argonauts jersey
FINALISTS: Frank Gunn, Canadian Press, for a shot of a woman diving head-first through the passenger seat window into her car on a flooded Toronto street; Steve Russell, Toronto Star, for an image of two couples enjoying Toronto's Gay Pride parade from a vantage point above street level

News Photo
WINNER: Shaughn Butts, Edmonton Journal, for an image of an unconscious young victim being carried from a fire
FINALISTS: Lucas Oleniuk, Toronto Star, for a shot of Filipino soldiers filling a mass grave dug in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan; Jordan Verlage, Canadian Press, for a picture of a man and his pet cat swimming to safety after the Highwood River overflowed its banks in High River, Alta.

Politics
WINNER: Jennifer Ditchburn, Canadian Press, for coverage of Senator Mike Duffy's expense claims, including revelations that Duffy had been campaigning for the Conservatives on days when he claimed expenses for Senate business
FINALISTS: Steven Chase, Boyd Erman and Daniel Leblanc, Globe and Mail, for stories exploring the role of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's advisor Nigel Wright in the Mike Duffy Senate expense scandal; Gary Mason, Globe and Mail, for a play-by-play analysis of how the B.C. Liberal party turned its fortunes around to win the last provincial election

Presentation
WINNER: Jason Chiu, Globe and Mail
FINALISTS: Nuri Ducassi, Zach Scott and Sarah Murdoch, Toronto Star; Brian Hughes, Toronto Star

Project of the Year
WINNER: Toronto Star for a series of stories that explored connections between the clothes on Canadians' backs and a tragic building collapse half a world away
FINALISTS: Globe and Mail for a series of stories that measured and analysed the real impact of income inequality in Canada; Halifax Chronicle Herald for a series of stories investigating the worrisome state of long-term care in Nova Scotia; Vancouver Province for a series of stories exploring racism in the increasingly multicultural Lower Mainland

Short Feature
WINNER: Grant Robertson, Globe and Mail, for a story that went inside the tightly controlled U.S. oil industry to investigate the crude oil being carried by a train that crashed in Lac-Mégantic, Que., killing 47 people
FINALISTS: Gabrielle Duchaine, Montreal La Presse, for story about eight severely disabled adults whose group home was on the verge of being shut down; Gordon Sinclair Jr., Winnipeg Free Press, for a profile of a child-like man who spent most of his 83 years in care facilities yet achieved a life full of happiness and purpose

Sports
WINNER: Randy Turner, Winnipeg Free Press, for stories about unregulated hockey leagues for elite young players, the future of curling in rural Manitoba, and hockey players' unhealthy habit of chewing tobacco
FINALISTS: Jon McCarthy, Toronto Sun, for three stories about the U.S. Open golf tournament; Caroline Touzin, Montreal La Presse, for a three-part profile of boxer Adonis Stevenson

Sports Photo
WINNER: Amber Bracken, Edmonton Sun, for a blood-spattered picture of two female boxers
FINALISTS: Jonathan Hayward, Canadian Press, for a low-angle view of a curler peering intently through the arms and legs of his sweepers; Darren Stone, Victoria Times Colonist, for a photo of an apparently headless hockey player

SOURCE: National Newspaper Awards

For further information: For more information, go to www.nna-ccj-ca or contact: Paul Woods, Editorial Consultant, National Newspaper Awards, [e-mail], 905 681-8675 (office), 647 606-8687 (mobile)