Toronto Star reporters Alyshah Hasham and Wendy Gillis have earned a Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) award for daily excellence for a 2021 story on a Muslim family killed in London, Ont.
Their story captures the waves of grief after the violent attack.
“So many people shared their memories of the Afzaal family with us during a time of unimaginable pain and horror,” Hasham said. “As we come close to the first anniversary of their deaths, we remember them and their community.”
The award winners were announced at a ceremony held in Montreal at the 2022 CAJ conference.
Wendy Gillis said daily news is “always a team effort.”
“We are grateful for this recognition from the CAJ,” she said. “Daily journalism, especially after such a major tragic event, is always a team effort. We are thankful to have such talented and caring colleagues and editors at the Star and we share this award with them.”
The Mindset Awards were also announced during the CAJ gala, with a team from the Toronto Star and Investigative Journalism Bureau at the University of Toronto receiving a first place prize for the 2021 Mindset Award for Reporting on the Mental Health of Young People.
They were tied with Simon Lewsen and photographer Chloē Ellingson, who also won first prize, for a multimedia piece in The Walrus.
Robert Cribb and Morgan Bockneck of the Star, alongside Charlie Buckley, Giulia Fiaoni, Declan Keogh, Radha Kohly, Liam G. McCoy and Danielle Orr of the Investigative Journalism Bureau, won the award for the 2021 portion of the two-year collaborative series called Generation Distress.
“It is a deep honor having these stories recognized in such a prestigious award,” said Robert Cribb, a Star investigative reporter and director of the Investigative Journalism Bureau.
“Generation Distress was a massive endeavor spanning nearly three years of work by senior journalists, data specialists and a small army of young reporters from journalism schools across the US and Canada. The results brought powerful new insights to an issue of pressing urgency.”
Star reporter Nadine Yousif received the honorable mention prize in the Mindset Award for Workplace Mental Health Reporting for her 2021 story on the pressure faced by nurses working through the pandemic.
The Toronto Star earned award nominations in three other categories in the 2021 CAJ awards for reporting on COVID-19 and community news.
Seven Star reporters landed spots as finalists in the categories for data journalism, freedom of information journalism, and written feature, nominated from among 522 entries.
Amy Dempsey was a finalist in the written feature category for her reporting on a long-term-care home’s fight over two waves of COVID-19.
Toronto Star reporters Ed Tubb, Kenyon Wallace and Brendan Kennedy earned a finalist spot in the data journalism award category for their investigation on for-profit long-term-care homes in Ontario and COVID-19.
Rachel Mendleson, Andrew Bailey and Jennifer Yang secured a spot as finalists in the freedom of information category for a story on Ontario’s back-to-school COVID-19 guidelines, based on internal government documents.
Founded in 1978, the Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) is a non-profit organization that advocates for journalists across Canada.
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