Herald earns nomination for national news award
The Calgary Herald earned a National Newspaper Award nomination Friday for its coverage of a tragic Amber Alert situation in southern Alberta last year.
The nomination came in the category of Breaking News — recognizing Herald print, online, photo and video coverage surrounding the September disappearance of two-year-old Hailey Dunbar-Blanchette. The Amber Alert ended with the heart-breaking discovery that Hailey had been killed, as was her father Terry Blanchette.
Also nominated for an award is a team of Postmedia sports writers for a series that focused on concussions. That team included former Calgary Herald reporter Vicki Hall, who is now a national Postmedia sports writer.
Postmedia owns the Calgary Herald and Calgary Sun as well as newspapers across the country.
In total, Postmedia journalists were nominated for 14 National Newspaper Awards.
Gerry Nott, Postmedia’s senior vice-president of content, said the nominations represented Postmedia’s “wealth and breadth of talents.”
Among other Postmedia newspapers, the Ottawa Citizen received four nominations.
The National Post, Montreal Gazette and Saskatoon Star-Phoenix were each nominated twice, including recognition in the politics category for the Gazette’s Linda Gyulai, who waged a seven-yearlong Access to Information battle to expose corruption in Montreal’s municipal government.
Claudia Cattaneo, the National Post’s western business columnist, got a nod in the Business category for her coverage of the tumultuous recent state of the Canadian energy sector. Cattaneo’s submissions for 2015 included exclusive reporting on a secret deal between oil companies and environmental organizations to cap greenhouse gas emissions in exchange for green groups ratcheting down their opposition to oil export pipelines.
National Post graphic artists Mike Faille and Dean Tweed were also finalists in the Presentation category for their regular infographics, including a detailed visual analysis of the police shooting of Sammy Yatim aboard a Toronto streetcar.
Two nominations came in for Sun Media papers, with the Kingston Whig- Standard’s Michelle Hauser nominated for her columns on sex education and the elderly, and a nod in the Local Reporting category for the Stratford Beacon Herald. This is the first year the former Quebecor properties have been under the Postmedia umbrella.
The awards will be handed out at a May 27 gala in Edmonton, which will also see the crowning of a “journalist of the year.”
The National Newspaper Awards, which have been awarded since 1949, are open to newspapers and approved online news sites. However, this year saw no finalists from entrants that did not also have a print edition.