Star’s Jesse Mclean honoured
Reporter, 24, wins Goff Penny award
The Toronto Star’s Jesse Mclean has been named Canada’s best young journalist and winner of the 21st annual Edward Goff Penny Memorial award.
Mclean won top honours for 2011 in the circulation over 25,000 category. The award is presented by the Canadian Newspaper Association and open to Canadian journalists aged 20 to 25. Mclean, 24, won for investigative and foreign reporting.
His local investigations revealed numerous guns and other weapons belonging to Peel regional police had gone missing and in most cases were never found. A second investigation probed the City of Toronto’s spending of nearly $2.5 million in untendered contracts.
Mclean’s foreign stories related to his role in reporting from Kuwait and Bahrain as part of the Star’s “Arab Awakening” series. In Bahrain, Mclean reported on the dis- order and hope in the country, walking among corpses in a hospital and searching medical charts to learn the names of the dead.
The Goff Penny awards are named after an editor and publisher, Edward Goff Penny, who was appointed to the Senate in 1874.
Star staff are also finalists in the 2011 Canadian Association of Journalists awards for outstanding investigative journalism. Moira Welsh, Mclean and Andrew Bailey have been named in the Open Newspaper category for their series dealing with abuse in nursing homes. Rick Madonik and Steve Russell are named in the Photojournalism category and Michelle Shephard in the Print Feature category for “Somalia: Where famine is a crime.” Winners will be announced April 28 at Toronto’s Fairmont Royal York Hotel.