Jody Porter wins Clarkson Laureateship in Public Service
CBC reporter awarded Massey College’s highest honour for connecting Aboriginal and Northern communities through reporting, including radio/social media project CommonGround Café.
by Chantal Braganza, Associate Editor
[[{“fid”:”3655″,”view_mode”:”default”,”fields”:{“format”:”default”,”field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]”:””,”field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]”:””},”type”:”media”,”link_text”:null,”attributes”:{“height”:”400″,”width”:”400″,”style”:”width: 100px; height: 100px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px; float: left;”,”class”:”media-element file-default”}}]]Thunder Bay CBC reporter Jody Porter was awarded the Clarkson Laureateship in Public Service Thursday night for her work in connecting Aboriginal and Northern communities through her reporting, including the radio/social media project Common Ground Café.
The Laureateship, bestowed by Massey College in the University of Toronto, is the college’s highest honour and has been awarded since 2004 to members of its community. Porter attended Massey College as a CBC/Radio-Canada fellow from 2013 to 2014.
“I started the radio/social experiments we called Common Ground Café,” Porter explained in a Q&A with the Canadian Media Guild, “first out of the hope that if the different communities in Thunder Bay could talk to each other and hear each other, there would be some understanding and eventually some change in attitudes and some common ground on which to build a community with less colonial baggage.” Launched in 2011, the program invited members from local Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities together for a broadcasted series of talks and dinners.
