The Globe and Mail is a modern, audience-focused newsroom with a clarity of purpose: Deliver exceptional, exclusive journalism that Canadians are willing to pay for.
We cover a country geographically larger than the U.S. with nimbleness and verve. The strength of our 200 journalists gives us the power to go big, but also pivot quickly to experiment with new ideas and rise to the challenge of the day.
To achieve this, we’ve built a custom suite of visual journalism tools that empower our newsroom to create more engaging stories and elevate our daily reader experience. These tools have led to higher audience engagement and positive reader feedback.
In turn, we are now more often able to produce groundbreaking journalism in less time, such as our “Escape from Afghanistan” feature. Produced in under a week, it documents a daring rescue of Afghan translators during the fall of Kabul. This piece received top honours from The Canadian Journalism Foundation.
To create “The Highway that Disappeared” – a visual document of the damage wrought by climate change – our visuals team strapped a GoPro to a helicopter and recorded 440 aerial images to build a model of a 40km stretch of highway ripped apart by flooding. The novel approach was praised by readers across Canada and from the impacted communities themselves.
In “Vacant Calgary”, we dug deep into building-by-building vacancy rates to paint a stark picture of what a downturn in oil prices can do to a once-bustling Canadian business centre. Our new approach to visualizing mapping data earned a gold medal for Innovation in Digital Storytelling from Canada’s Digital Publishing Awards.
A trio of features focused on Olympic sport (Climbing, Ice Dance, and Swimming) offered audiences a uniquely accessible visual understanding of the complexities of elite athletic performance. These interactive stories drew praise from new readers and subscribers alike.
In “No Place to Grow Old”, we visited the Arctic territory of Nunavut to tell the story of Inuit elders forced to spend their final years in retirement homes thousands of kilometres away from their traditional culture, communities and families – a sombre echo of the decades of injustice faced by Inuit who were victims of Canada’s residential schools system.
We committed to in-depth coverage of the war in Ukraine through dedicated correspondents on the ground in Kyiv, and long-term coverage of the refugee crisis throughout Europe. One early example of visual storytelling that resonated strongly with readers was “Too Precious to Leave Behind”, in which refugees were photographed holding their cherished keepsakes.
On Instagram, we brought The Globe’s high-quality personal finance content to a younger demographic yearning for trusted information in a dire economic world. By making our journalism more accessible, we attracted a new, engaged readership and helped them make smart decisions about their financial futures.
And lastly, we had fun: delving into the science of how birds sing to give readers a much needed audio-visual respite from the news of the day.
