The Nelson Star has won three times at this year’s Canadian Community Newspaper Awards for papers with a reader circulation of between 4,000 and 12,499.
Jake Sherman, who worked as a reporter at the Star for only a few months in 2017, won first prize in the Best News Photograph category for “CP holiday trains stops in Nelson.”
“I am absolutely blown away,” Sherman told the Star in an email Monday. “The photo was shot at 1/125 because the train was actually moving. I tend to get pretty in the zone when I’m photographing. It’s really becomes an exercise in presence, almost a meditation. So I really wasn’t thinking much. I just set the speed and the aperture and clicked the shutter. I knew as soon as I saw it it was a keeper.”
The winning photograph (above) is one of several extraordinary photos Sherman took that night. The others can be found in the story linked above.
Reporter Tyler Harper won second prize in the Best Feature Story category for “Call it intuition: Norm Pratt’s gift for finding people”
“I’m stunned,” Harper said. “The story was definitely one of the quirkier pieces I’ve done. The credit really belongs to Norm Pratt, who gave so much of himself to a reporter he’d just met, as well as the Nelson Police Department without whom this story would not have been told.”
Reporter Bill Metcalfe, who was the editor of the Star in 2017, won third place in the Best National Editorial category for “From Nelson to Quebec City and back again.”
“The editorial was a reaction to the Quebec mosque shooting,” Metcalfe said. “It’s easy for people in this small mostly white rural city to be smug about events like that and to think we’re above that sort of racist violence. I wondered what would happen if a few hundred asylum seekers from the Middle East suddenly arrived in Nelson. Would we Nelsonites be so cool then?”