2001 Michener-Deacon Fellowship

Martine Turenne, 2001 Michener-Deacon Fellowship.

This year’s Michener-Deacon Fellowship winner to study impact of NAFTA on Mexico.

Martine Turenne, a reporter with L’actualité magazine, is the recipient of the 2001 Michener-Deacon Fellowship. The Fellowship was presented to her at a Rideau Hall ceremony on May 24, 2001 by Her Excellency Adrienne Clarkson, Governor General of Canada.

The Montreal journalist won for a proposal to report the significance of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on an underdeveloped region of Mexico by studying at a Mexican university and living in the heart of a NAFTA development project. After this experience she will be able to explain to her readers what Canada can learn from Mexico and how what is happening there directly affects Canadians.

Turenne has been a reporter at L’actualité since 1998. Before that she worked for Le Devoir, Radio-Canada, Réseau de l’Information, and CKAC -Télémedia.

The Michener-Deacon Fellowship is intended to allow the journalist four months of studies that promote the public interest and benefit the community while at the same time enhancing the journalist’s own competence. The fellowship is awarded annually, depending on merit.

There were 10 entries this year. Previous projects have included studies of the role of public television news in an age of increasing competition and globalization in communications, and Vancouver’s drug-abuse problem.

Judges for the 2001 Fellowship:

Jodi White, Managing Director of Sydney House, Ottawa (chair of the judging panel); former journalists Shirley Sharzer of Ottawa and Claire Helman of Montreal, and Clinton Archibald, Professor of Public Policy and Management, University of Ottawa.

The Fellowship of the Michener Awards Foundation, introduced in 1987, is known today as the Michener-Deacon Fellowship (named after the late Roland Michener and the late Paul Deacon, a senior media executive and Michener Awards Foundation president). The Fellowship is to encourage excellence in investigative print and broadcast journalism that serves the public interest through values that benefit the community. Mature journalists are invited to submit written outlines for studies over four months that will strengthen their competence.