Another accolade for Star/Spec investigative series

Retired Spectator reporter Steve Buist picked up some more hardware for his swan song investigative journalism on Friday.

Buist, along with the Toronto Star's Rachel Mendleson, shared the John Honderich Award for Project of the Year at the National Newspaper Awards for Unchartered, their national investigation into Charter of Rights violations by police. The award is named in honour of longtime Star publisher and chair John Honderich, who died in 2022.

Earlier this week, Unchartered was also nominated at the Digital Publishing Awards. The series won the 2023 Canadian Hillman Prize in March and was nominated for the 2022 Michener Award for meritorious public service journalism in April.

Buist wrapped up a prestigious 36-year career at The Hamilton Spectator in October. He was crowned Canada's Investigative Journalist of the Year three times and Ontario's Journalist of the Year five times. The nod for Unchartered is his fifth win at the National Newspaper Awards and he has been the recipient of the world's top cancer-reporting prize handed out by the European School of Oncology.

Both Buist and Mendleson investigated more than 600 Charter cases and found that only a small number of officers faced serious professional consequences.

They looked for cases where judges found that police had breached the rights of the accused, and created a database that spanned from 2011 to 2021.

The Spec was also nominated for two other awards at the National Newspaper Awards (NNA) ceremony.

Susan Clairmont's feature on the tragic suicide of 12-year-old Grace McSweeney after years of bullying was nominated for the William Southam Award for Long Feature.

Sebastian Bron and Katrina Clarke (now a reporter at the Winnipeg Free Press) were finalists in the Sustained News Coverage category for a series of stories that examined a privacy breach at St. Joseph's Healthcare Hamilton.

The Globe and Mail won nine of the 23 available NNAs. The award for Journalist of the Year went to Isabelle Hachey, of La Presse, who also won in the International Reporting category.

The NNAs honour the best journalists and their work in Canada's daily and community newspapers. Digital organizations that publish at least five days a week are also recognized.

Judges this year considered a total of 923 entries, all published in 2022, from 76 news organizations.

Reach The Spectator newsroom at 905-526-3420 or news@thespec.com