Headed for Norway

by Peter Johansen

Master of Journalism students Samia Madwar and Ora Morrison have won this year’s Carleton-Norway Journalism Travel Awards.  Norwegian Ambassador Else Berit Eikeland made the announcement yesterday at a brief ceremony in the university art gallery.

The awards are given to improve communication between Norway and Canada as northern countries, the ambassador said.

Samia, who grew up in Syria, has demonstrated her interest in northern issues, visiting Kuujjuaq, Quebec to research the impact of parasites and bacteria on subsistence hunting.  She wants to spend time pursuing stories about safety standards in the oil and gas industry in Norway’s Barents region and the effect of diseased wildlife on communities in the northern regions of both Canada and Norway.  She graduated from McGill University with a major in biology and was an intern at Canadian Geographic magazine and Air Canada’s enRoute magazine.

Ora is from Cayuga, Ont., where she worked as a reporter for The Grand River Sachem. In Norway, she wants to pursue stories about the comparative experiences of that country’s Sami and Canada’s Inuit regarding self-government and the preservation of indigenous cultures, and also plans to examine Internet penetration in both nations’ northern regions.  A business graduate from the University of Western Ontario, she has interned at an accounting company in Tunisia and at the St. Catharines Standard, and was active at the UWO student newspaper.

This is the second year the embassy has offered the award. The Norwegian government pays the costs for two Carleton journalism students to travel to Norway and work at a Norwegian publication, which again this year will be the Barents Observer, an English language newspaper in Kirkenes, located at the top of the country near the Russian border.

This year, the competition attracted 15 applicants.  Blogs by last year’s winners, B.A. student Margaret Cappa and M.A. student Chantaie Allick, were so popular that Norway’s foreign affairs ministry linked to them from their own website, Ambassador Eikeland said.