The Michele Landsberg Award recognizes journalism that advances awareness of women’s equality issues through a gendered lens.
It is an extraordinary honour, particularly because it carries the name of Michele Landsberg — a formidable advocate and fearless Canadian journalist whose work helped make women’s experiences visible in places where they were too often ignored or dismissed.
But awards can create strange moments in journalism.
To be completely honest, the moment I heard my name called as the 2026 winner was disorienting.
We spend years immersed in difficult stories, statistics that slowly become people and interviews that stay with us long after the notebooks close.
Then, one day, that work transforms into recognition and congratulations.
While I am deeply grateful for this award recognizing exceptional reporting, the work itself exists only because of gaps in policy and accountability and how seriously violence against women is taken.
I will not celebrate those failings.
What appalls me most is not only the violence itself, but how easily it is absorbed into the background of everyday life.
Statistically, almost everyone knows a woman who has experienced violence.
Yet, I constantly encounter attitudes that frame gendered violence as an unfortunate inevitability rather than a societal failure — something women are simply expected to deal with as quietly as possible.
The stories that shaped this reporting were entrusted to us by people who had every reason to turn away from journalists, but chose not to: families carrying unimaginable grief, advocates worn down by years of fighting for recognition and women terrified by their abusers into years of silence.
Many of the stories begin with someone wondering whether they will be believed or if anyone will care.
I always repeat to them the quote that hangs over my desk: “Speak the truth, even if your voice shakes.”
The bravery of these sources, amplified through our reporting, has already contributed to tangible change: shifts in law and policy, greater public awareness and a challenge to the mantle of shame that, unfairly, is so often placed on survivors and victims.
That matters because journalism should do more than document harm. At its best, it forces institutions and systems to answer for it and makes it harder for injustice to continue.
Investigations are measured by what audiences see: a published story, a headline shared, an award announced. What is not visible are the months behind them — the interviews, the datasets built from scratch and the questions that initially seem too large or difficult to pursue.
That invisible work enables accountability, but it only happens when sufficient resources sustain it.
Work like this does not exist in a vacuum. It exists because people decide to make it possible.
Readers, donors and supporters choose to fund the months of reporting no one sees — the interviews, the documents, the questions that take time to answer.
When that support is there, someone finds the courage to speak and is met with evidence instead of doubt. When it isn’t, the silence remains exactly where it has always been: intact, unchallenged and easier to ignore.
You can be part of ensuring that silence is broken.
In doing so, you help ensure this reporting continues.
