02-09-2023, 10:01 PM
(02-08-2023, 09:17 PM)dtkvictim Wrote: 1) Their awards are only open to their 26 member newspapers. I only did a quick search of each, but it appears that 25 out of 26 members are owned by either TorStar or Postmedia (the seemingly sole exception being The Thunder Bay Chronicle Journal).
2) There is no readily available information (at least that I could find without spending more than 10 minutes on this entire post) about who runs the ONA, how winners are decided, etc.
3) Of the ONA's 4 listed sponsors, two are - you guessed it - TorStar and Postmedia. The other two are Labatt and University of Toronto.
4) Only 2 authors have posted on the ONA website. The first, Lori-Anne Hill, is a current UofT employee (one of the sponsors), and - you guessed it - was an HR Director at Postmedia for 11 years... and held various positions are Metroland, part of Torstar, for 7 years. The second author isn't really suspicious, but was a freelance writer for a Torstar paper, and worked for the National Newspaper Awards.
In the most recent year's awards, 1/3 of The Record's employees were nominated for, or, won an award. Do this for a few years and suddenly your newspaper is entirely staffed by award winning journalists! They can now plaster it all over their profiles and social media pages and make people feel better about reading their drivel. The few other newspapers I checked had a similar situation.
I might have missed something that lends credibility to this award, so call me out if I did, but I've seen this pattern across so many industries. Even ones far more trustworthy than journalism dominated by the Torstar/Postmedia duopoly.
The awards were established in 1953 at which time we did not have a duopoly in Ontario. I suspect that the ONA membership became equally concentrated just as the Brewer's Retail became an equally concentrated entity.