Collaborative UBC project wins Digital Publishing Award

May 29, 2020

The Fish You (Don’t Know) You Eat, an in-depth investigation of the global fishmeal industry, is the inaugural project of the Global Reporting Program, and was produced in collaboration with NBC News in 2019.

The Peter Wall Institute contributed to this project by funding a collaboration between Executive Director of the Global Reporting Centre and 2015 Wall Scholar Peter Klein (School of Journalism) and 2017 Wall Scholar Xiaonan Lu (Land and Food Systems) to perform genetic testing on fish collected in the field.

The fishmeal investigation saw groups of students reporting from China, Peru, and West Africa.

“So many issues in our lives are global the pandemic has certainly demonstrated that. And certainly, the issue of global fisheries illustrates that. Fish don’t respect country boundaries, nor do fisheries supply chains. So to do in-depth reporting, we need to be global in our focus,” explained Klein.

“This journalism project benefited enormously from academic rigor, and the Wall Institute helped us bring a scholarly lens to the project.”

Earlier in the spring, the project also won best multimedia production at the Emerge Media Awards, received a special mention for the Student Award at the One World Media Awards in the U.K. and was nominated for the Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) award for the Student Award of Excellence.

With notes from the GRC and the UBC School of Journalism
Photo by Sebastian Romero Torres