2011.12.01

 

Canadian wins student journalism Barr Award

Encouraged by a professor to enter a competition for a student journalism award, Meagan Gillmore figured she had nothing to lose but the extra postage it cost for expedited delivery to Washington, D.C.

To her surprise and delight, she is this year's winner of The Newspaper Guild's David S. Barr Award, which encourages young journalists to focus on issues of social justice.

Gillmore, 23, who graduated with honors degrees in Journalism and English from Wilfrid Laurier University (Brantford) in June, now lives in Hamilton. She's hoping to find work as a reporter but realizes these are tough times in the media industry.

However, being legally blind, she is accustomed to overcoming challenges. In some ways, she says, her visual impairment has worked to her advantage when it comes to interviewing people. She says they tend to be a lot more forthcoming than they might be when speaking with a sighted person.

She still has most of the $1,500 that came with the Barr award and plans to spend some of it to purchase artwork that memorializes buildings that were demolished in her hometown of Brantford. The city's controversial project was the subject of her Barr-award-winning features in the university's student paper, The Sputnik.