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Arachnid podcast awarded prestigious Hillman prize

Robert Cribb, Wendy-Ann Clarke, Susanne Reber, Laurie Few, and Bruce Edwards have been awarded the coveted Canadian Hillman award.
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Arachnid: Hunting the Web’s Darkest Secrets, a podcast by the Investigative Journalism Bureau, TVO Today and Piz Gloria Productions, has won a prestigious Canadian Hillman prize. 

The prize, presented annually by the Sidney Hillman Foundation, awards Canadian journalists who seek out stories that change lives, expose important social and economic injustices in Canada and bring about change for the better.

Congratulations to Robert Cribb, Wendy-Ann Clarke, Susanne Reber, and Laurie Few for this distinguished and well-deserved recognition. 

“This year’s Hillman prize winners remind us that courageous journalism is the cornerstone of democracy,” said Alex Dagg, Canadian board member of the Sidney Hillman Foundation, in a press release. “By shining a light on government injustice, and holding the powerful to account, these journalists have upheld the public’s right to know.’ 

Arachnid is a six-part podcast examining the efforts to end the massive, global online trade in child sex abuse material. A small Winnipeg-based, non-profit organization, the Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P), has created a free, web-crawling tool that can quickly and easily trace the trade in these horrific images. All that stands in the way is the tech platforms’ refusal to use it.

“This is difficult subject matter, with highly vulnerable sources who, as children, became prey for sophisticated criminals committing deeply troubling crimes,” said Robert Cribb, the host of Arachnid and director of the IJB. “Finding a way to access this shadowy world and tell this story in a compelling way while respecting the voices telling it took a remarkable team of ethically-driven journalists.”

The team behind Arachnid spent years building trust with sources in this sensitive field. The podcast takes listeners from the Winnipeg-based computers that spin their webs around the globe, to police stations, to the office of the online safety commissioner in Australia, and to the living rooms of still-vulnerable survivors.

Investigative Journalism Bureau
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