Press Freedom Award Winner
Melissa Martin
Martin is an award-winning reporter-at-large for the Winnipeg Free Press. After Russia’s 2022 invasion, Martin made a reporting trip to Ukraine. In 2023, she took a leave from the paper and returned to Ukraine to live, sharing dispatches via Substack and occasionally in the paper. Martin wrote vividly and compellingly about the resilience of civilians against fear and loss in war. She won the National Newspaper Award for column writing in 2017.
Career Achievement Award in honour of Spencer Moore Winner
Robyn Doolittle
Doolittle is The Globe and Mail’s corporate law reporter and a veteran investigative journalist. She was a key member of the Globe team behind Secret Canada, a multi-year project that exposed Canada’s broken freedom of information system. In Unfounded, she investigated how Canadian police services handle sexual assault cases. The series led to a national overhaul of the way sexual violence is investigated and prosecuted. Doolittle is the author of two books, Had It Coming: What’s Fair in the Age of #MeToo?, which was shortlisted for the RBC Taylor Prize for non-fiction, and Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story.
Press Freedom Certificates of Merit
Frédérik-Xavier Duhamel
Duhamel is a reporter in The Globe and Mail’s Montreal bureau. After a deadly fire in an Airbnb, he launched an investigation into shoddy inspection and enforcement
efforts by Montreal’s fire department. He pursued access to information records through Quebec’s complaints office, forcing a mediation session and negotiations with city lawyers to obtain thousands of pages of additional records. Duhamel previously worked for La Presse and CBC Radio in Montreal and Vancouver.
Sara Mojtehedzadeh
Mojtehedzadeh is a Toronto Star reporter who led an investigation into the extent to which Ontario’s economy relies on exploited and, at times, illegally trafficked workers. Mojtehedzadeh spent months in courtrooms from Scarborough to Barrie to the Niagara Region, sparring with Crown attorneys and criminal defence lawyers over the public’s right to know. She unearthed thousands of pages of police evidence that was shielded from public view.
Keith Corcoran
Corcoran is a reporter for the weekly LighthouseNow Progress Bulletin in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia. He waged a lonely but ultimately successful battle to have courts release search records. He recently received his first batch of documents and continues the fight with foot-dragging court bureaucrats.
Freedom of Information citation: The Globe and Mail
The committee is also awarding a Freedom of Information citation to The Globe and Mail and its team of Tom Cardoso, Robyn Doolittle, Carys Mills, Mahima Singh and Ming Wong for its multi-year Secret Canada project, which exposed Canada’s dysfunctional access to information systems and also created a website to help journalists and other citizens access government information.
Efficient and timely access to information is critical to a free and independent press, and helps journalists inform citizens and hold governments to account.
Student Achievement Award Winner
Charles Seguin and Naomie Duckett-Zamor
Montreal Campus, the student newspaper at Université du Québec à Montréal. The editorial team of Charles Seguin and Naomie Duckett-Zamor produced a series of articles on the lack of democracy at the student associations. The journalists prevailed against threats and the theft of newspapers designed to thwart their coverage.
Student Achievement Certificates of Merit
Evan Robins
Robins is a student journalist at Trent University, who faced threats and harassment in reporting on lack of democracy among student associations.
Faith Greco
Greco navigated complex legal landscapes and faced intimidation tactics, including death threats and harassment as she reported in the student newspaper, The Charlatan, on hazing within Carleton University’s Greek organizations.
