Business in Vancouver reporter Joel McKay has won a Jack Webster Award – B.C.'s top journalistic honour – for the newspaper's four-part series on the proposed Prosperity mine near Williams Lake.
McKay won in the business, industry and economics category, beating out the Vancouver Sun's David Baines and freelance reporter Daniel Wood.
McKay's series, Chasing Prosperity, ran in November and December of 2010, in BIV issues 1101-1104. Read McKay's four-part series here: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4
McKay said he put the Chasing Prosperity series together to cut through the spin and confusion that surrounded the project.
"There was a lot of confusion about what exactly the draining of the lake entailed, what was going to go in its place, the economic situation in Williams Lake," McKay said. "There was also a lot of confusion on the First Nations side, in terms of why they were so vehemently opposed to the project and why it mattered to them."
The federal government has since scuttled the Prosperity project, but proponent Taseko Mines (TSX:TKO) has launched a new proposal for the project, branded as New Prosperity. (See: "Taseko lauds economic benefits of New Prosperity"– BIV Business Today, October 18.)
While reporting for the series, McKay braved Northern B.C. weather on a helicopter trip up to the mine site. But he said the biggest research challenge was navigating the complex paper trail.
"It was a grind going through hundreds of pages of environmental assessment documents, going through letters, figuring out every filing that had been put in there by the public, anything that had been produced by opponents and proponents alike and sifting through that information and trying to make sense of it."
McKay has been BIV's resources reporter since December 2009.
Jenny Wagler
@JennyWagler_BIV