The Walrus congratulates journalists Allison Baker, Viviane Fairbank, and Sadiya Ansari on their new fellowships.
The Michener Awards Foundation recently announced that its Michener-L. Richard O’Hagan Fellowship has been awarded to Allison Baker and Viviane Fairbank. Both are alumni of the esteemed editorial fellowship program at The Walrus. Fairbank, a former associate editor and head of research at The Walrus, and Baker, one of the founding contributors to The Walrus Fact-Checking project—an independent initiative launched in 2018 to combat mis/disinformation online—are also regular contributors to The Walrus.
The Michener-L. Richard O’Hagan Fellowship for Journalism Education will support the creation of a book-length version of The Walrus Fact-Checking Guide, a tool originally created by Fairbank and The Walrus to train editorial fellows and freelance fact-checkers. This award will enable Fairbank and Baker to expand on the guide first developed under Fairbank’s leadership as head of research at The Walrus from 2017–2019, establishing guidelines and a common reporting and verification methodology for journalists, academics, and the public. The project also aims to create a free and accessible curriculum for fact-checking education. This project was chosen by Michener judges “because it had the broadest appeal and the biggest potential impact.” The fellowship is worth $40,000 plus $5,000 in travel expenses.
Carleton University recently announced that Sadiya Ansari and Alex Boyd will share this year’s R. James Travers Foreign Corresponding Fellowship. The $25,000 fellowship supports a significant foreign reporting project by Canadian journalists or journalism students. Ansari is a freelance journalist based in Berlin whose work has appeared in publications such as the Guardian, Maclean’s, Vice, the Toronto Star, and the Globe and Mail. Her assignment is to report and write a solutions-based feature for The Walrus imagining childcare as a right, along with a post-publication roundtable on the childcare crisis in Canada. This project is expected to be published in The Walrus in 2022, contributing to the body of journalism in areas of public policy of significant interest to Canadians.
“These journalists’ achievements reflect a commitment to editorial excellence and a demonstrated passion for what good journalism means to readers that has been developed at The Walrus over many years, and that is especially meaningful in this time of great reflection for our industry,” said editor-in-chief Jessica Johnson. “Especially now, it’s rewarding to see this work come to fruition in a way that can benefit all journalists.”
The Walrus is honoured to support these fellowships, and looks forward to sharing the final projects with our audience.
Learn more in the original press releases here:
Michener Awards Foundation announces Fellowship winners
2021 Travers Journalism Fellowship Recipients Sadiya Ansari and Alex Boyd
