J-Source

Selena Ross named the winner of inaugural CIC-Walrus Longform competition

Selena Ross has won The Canadian International Council and The Walrus inaugural longform competition. Selena Ross has won The Canadian International Council and The Walrus inaugural longform competition. The Halifax-based reporter for The Chronicle Herald pitched a story about scientific research in Canada’s Arctic. Her pitch was one of more than 100 submissions that the CIC-Walrus competition…

Selena Ross has won The Canadian International Council and The Walrus inaugural longform competition.

Selena Ross has won The Canadian International Council and The Walrus inaugural longform competition.

The Halifax-based reporter for The Chronicle Herald pitched a story about scientific research in Canada’s Arctic. Her pitch was one of more than 100 submissions that the CIC-Walrus competition received from graduate students, journalists, academics, public policy figures and NGO and business community members. Ross will receive a $7,500 commission for the piece, which will appear in an issue of The Walrus in 2013.

Ross was selected as the winner by a jury consisting of Tony Burman, Adam Gopnik, Janice Stein, Lyse Doucet, Nahlah Ayed, and the editor and co-publisher of The Walrus, John Macfarlane.

It will be the first piece that Ross will have published in The Walrus, and she told J-Source via email this afternoon that she was honoured the selection committee liked her pitch. “It's such a valuable contest in Canada, where there aren't too many homes for long-form journalism, and I couldn't be happier to help kick it off.”

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Ross will travel to the Arctic as part of her research.

“The selection committee was impressed by the quality and breadth of the entries we received,” Macfarlane said in a release, “and we’re pleased that Selena Ross will be working with The Walrus to produce the kind of high-quality, long-form journalism that our readers have come to expect.”

Jennifer Jeffs, president of the CIC, added: “We are delighted that Selena Ross has been selected as the winner of this competition. … Her topic is timely and speaks to opencanada.org’s goal to make research more accessible, foreign policy more engaging, and journalism more substantive.”

Last year, as the press honed in on Montreal’s construction industry and the corruption that was being exposed there, Ross focused her attention on another dirty industry in the city: snow removal. She explained how she got that Maisonneuve magazine story, which would garner her a Canadian Association of Journalists Award the following April, to Rhiannon Russell for J-Source.