International Reporting Program

Dying Without Morphine

By Ronald Pina. Published September 2014.

UBC Journalism students win Gold COPA Award

UBC Journalism students and alumni were honored with two wins at the Canadian Online Publishing Awards (COPA) for their work on China’s Generation Green.

Students in the school’s award-winning International Reporting Program (IRP) won gold for Best Interactive Story for their series China’s Generation Green, which focuses on the emerging environmental movement in that country.

To produce this project, the second-year students of the 2013/14 class travelled throughout China, meeting with young families in smog-choked Beijing and shadowing activists drawing attention to contaminated farms.

Once they were back home, the students got to work crafting multimedia online, published in collaboration with the Toronto Star.

Illegal Logging project honoured by Murrow Award

CUT, a multimedia documentary about illegal logging, has won a Regional Edward R. Murrow Award, the highest honour from the Radio, Television and Digital News Association. The is the most recent in a long list of awards for this project, which was produced by UBC Graduate School of Journalism International Reporting Program, in collaboration with the Centre for Digital Media.

CUT is the culmination of a year of research and reporting tracing the sources of lumber and paper from forests around the world. Students traveled to the Russian Far East, Cameroon and Indonesia, documenting the problems with illegal logging, and exploring efforts to slow down deforestation. Excerpts of the multimedia documentary were featured in The New York Times.

Students worked with scholars from the Liu Institute and UBC Forestry to understand the economics, science and politics behind illegal logging, and also collaborated with students and professors from International University in Moscow.

The Regional Murrow Award is in the category of Small Online News Organization: Overall Excellence. CUT was also recently a Webby Honoree in the “Green” category, which recognizes the best of environmental journalism, and it received the Gold Award for the best video or multimedia feature in 2013 Canadian Online Publishing Award, Canada’s top prizes for online journalism.

“As a longtime producer at CBS News, where the ghost of Murrow still looms large, this is a particularly meaningful recognition,” said Peter Klein, Director of the Graduate School of Journalism and Founder of the International Reporting Program. Klein co-taught the course with Dave Rummel, a veteran journalist who joined the faculty three years ago after serving as senior producer of the video and documentary unit of The New York Times.

“We hope CUT will be the first step of an ambitious environmental reporting initiative we want to build at UBC,” said Prof. Rummel. Klein and Rummel are fundraising to create the Global Reporting Centre, a non-profit international reporting organization that will be based out of UBC and will produce major works of journalism on under-covered global issues.

Funding for CUT was provided by Mindset Social Innovation Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council.

International Reporting Program takes home three COPAs

Two classes of UBC Graduate School of Journalism students, studying international reporting, won the country’s highest award in online journalism, the Canadian Online Publishing Awards (COPAs), for multimedia documentaries.

UBC School of Journalism calls for release of Canadian journalist and Al Jazeera colleagues detained in Egypt

The University of British Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and the International Reporting Program are calling for the release of Mohamed Fadel Fahmy, Peter Greste and Baher Mohamed, three Al Jazeera English journalists who were detained by Egyptian authorities last month.