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The Globe and Mail's multimedia coverage of missing and murdered indigenous women has been nominated for an Online Journalism Award, the only major Canadian media outlet to be recognized this year among an international field.
The Globe's coverage was nominated in the Topical Reporting (Large) category, in an announcement made Tuesday by the Washington-based Online News Association, whose awards honour excellence in digital journalism.
Through months of reporting and analysis, reporter Kathryn Blaze Baum and data journalist Matthew McClearn discovered that indigenous women are vastly overrepresented among serial-killer victims.
A location-based multimedia interactive called The Taken traced the lives of five of these women, from birth to their encounters with their killers. The project allowed readers to track and map the way in which the serial killers' paths intersected with their victims and capped the amount of text on each slide to pull the reader into the story.
The Taken boasted an unprecedented time spent on mobile compared to The Globe's other projects and maintained a high percentage of readers who stayed to the story's end.
A follow-up project called The Trafficked, by reporter Tavia Grant, unveiled how Canada lacks a comprehensive system of data collection for sex trafficking.
The Globe conducted more than 60 interviews with trafficked women, their families, police, researchers, advocates and front-line providers. A video about one survivor had nearly one million views and appeared in more than three million Facebook feeds.
Both The Taken and The Trafficked were widely discussed on social media and shared by organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and ProPublica.
Nominated in the same category is the Los Angeles Times for its interactive project on Hollywood's diversity problem, dubbed #OscarsSoWhite, and The Guardian U.S.'s investigation into the deadliest police force in the United States.
The winners will be announced on Sept. 17 in Denver.