Book Launch
On Thursday, September 26 from 5-7pm, you are invited to the book launch of Senior Resident Kim Kierans. Kim will be in conversation about her book Journalism for the Public Good: The Michener Awards at 50 (Bighorn Books, University of Calgary Press) with award-winning journalist Anna Maria Tremonti. Following the conversation, there will be an audience Q&A, book sales/signing and a reception. Register here.
For fifty years, the Michener Awards have honoured outstanding and unbiased Canadian journalism that results in positive change for the public good. Named after Governor General Roland Michener, these awards have been recognizing the essential role of free media within democracy and honouring organizations that invest in public interest journalism since 1971.
Journalism for the Public Good: The Michener Awards at 50 (Bighorn Books, University of Calgary Press, 2024) is the story of the Micheners told through an exploration of the award-winning reporting that the awards have been celebrating for half a century. It traces how journalism has evolved, influenced, and been changed by Canadian society over the past half-century, and explores the challenges journalists face today. Journalism for the Public Good is a celebration of the organizations and individuals who give voice to marginalized communities, challenge the powerful, and, though their journalism, make Canada a better place.
The author behind Journalism for the Public Good, Kim Kierans, is an Inglis Professor emerita in the School of Journalism, Writing, & Publishing at the University of King’s College, Halifax, where she taught for twenty-four years after a career in journalism.
Photo: MCpl Matthieu Racette, Rideau Hall © OSGG, 2024
With a foreword by The Right Honourable David Johnston, Governor General of Canada, 2010-2017, the book takes its audience from the birth of the Michener Award through a rich history of change, disruption, and storytelling in Canada. In particular, Kierans noted that the book serves as “a 50-year history of Canadian journalism – with all its ups and downs – through the lens of the Michener Awards Foundation, an organization that recognizes investigative journalism that demonstrated impact. Mostly though, this book is a love letter to journalists and media organizations who in the face of huge challenges continue to produce and fund stories that change public policy and improve the lives of Canadians.”
Margo Goodhand, Michener Awards Foundation President, highlighted how Kierans’ book is “an important and timely history of Canada’s own Pulitzer Prize for Journalism. In an age of fake news and relentless propaganda, Kim Kierans shows us how the Micheners were created to honour and inspire the nation’s newsrooms — and why they continue to be a beacon for truth, integrity and social justice.”
To learn more about Journalism for the Public Good or to purchase a copy, please visit the University of Calgary Press.
