A documentary on electronic waste, produced for PBS' FRONTLINE by a team from the Graduate School of Journalism at University of British Columbia, won an Emmy award Monday in New York for its investigative excellence over competition from CBS' 60 Minutes and 48 Hours and ABC's Nightline.
It's the first such win for a Canadian journalism school. The project --- Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground --- was produced by professor Peter Klein (a previous Emmy winner and an Emmy nominee in his own right Monday) and financed through a Mindset Media grant and benefactor-filmmaker Alison Lawton.
Lawton furnished the UBC school with a $1-million fund to produce international documentaries, a key piece in the creation of the international reporting course.
A team of 10 UBC students travelled to Ghana, India and China to chronicle how casually electronic waste is disposed. Along the way they found a hard drive with sensitive American defence contract information, but mainly they discovered a trail of indifference about environmental standards and worker safety.
(Disclosure: I have taught at the school since 2004 and my spouse has been its director since 2008 and an associate professor since its inception more than a decade ago.)
It's the first such win for a Canadian journalism school. The project --- Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground --- was produced by professor Peter Klein (a previous Emmy winner and an Emmy nominee in his own right Monday) and financed through a Mindset Media grant and benefactor-filmmaker Alison Lawton.
Lawton furnished the UBC school with a $1-million fund to produce international documentaries, a key piece in the creation of the international reporting course.
A team of 10 UBC students travelled to Ghana, India and China to chronicle how casually electronic waste is disposed. Along the way they found a hard drive with sensitive American defence contract information, but mainly they discovered a trail of indifference about environmental standards and worker safety.
(Disclosure: I have taught at the school since 2004 and my spouse has been its director since 2008 and an associate professor since its inception more than a decade ago.)
