Former Times Colonist reporter Amy Smart was honoured at the Jack Webster Foundation Awards on Monday evening for her story on fish farming.
Smart was nominated in the feature/enterprise reporting category for her article, B.C. fish farms: A tangled net, which ran in the Dec. 3, 2017 edition of the Times Colonist.
Sam Cooper, a Vancouver Sun reporter, won the category for his work on Dirty Money in B.C.: Casinos, Drugs, Real Estate.
Smart is now working for the Canadian Press in Vancouver and her byline continues to appear in the Times Colonist.
Winners were announced at the Hyatt Regency Vancouver.
Smart travelled to Vancouver Island’s northeast coast and into the Broughton Archipelago late last year to research her 3,500-word story on open-pen fish farming. Salmon farms were in the spotlight last year after Indigenous and non-Indigenous protesters began occupying fish farms in the summer.
The story addressed the environmental worries of fish farm opponents. It looked at the research into how disease is spread among farmed, wild and hatchery raised fish.
Smart’s story also took readers to a fish processing plant in Port Hardy to illustrate the economic importance of the industry to northern Vancouver Island.
Former Times Colonist reporter Rob Shaw won in the business, industry and economics category for his Vancouver Sun story The economics of public auto insurance, which explored the workings of ICBC. His stories frequently appear in the Times Colonist. — Times Colonist
