By Jena Lynde-Smith
Carleton journalism professor Brett Popplewell has been nominated in three categories for this year’s National Magazine Awards (NMAs).
Photo by Jenn Lawrence
The NMAs are given out by the National Media Awards Foundation, a charity dedicated to promoting excellence in journalism and visual creation. The foundation has been awarding prizes to journalists, photographers, illustrators and other professionals of the magazine press for 45 years.
Popplewell’s nominations this year are for an investigative article, “Doctor Fentanyl,” and his publication, The Feathertale Review.
He is up for the Investigative Reporting and Long-Form Feature Writing awards for “Doctor Fentanyl,” published in Toronto Life last March. The piece tells the story of George Otto, a Richmond Hill doctor who, along with a pharmacist named Shereen El-Azrak, trafficked more than 4,000 fentanyl patches onto the street.
Popplewell said the story was a challenge to report amid the backdrop of the pandemic.
“I was reporting on the story for much of 2020,” he said. “For months, I chased police, got stonewalled by lawyers and tried to gain access to public documents from a slow-moving court system. One character in the story tragically died of a fentanyl overdose while I was piecing together the narrative. Despite my best efforts to interview the doctor at the heart of the story, his family and his lawyers, not a single individual from his life would speak to me.”
“Doctor Fentanyl” is not only a story of George Otto, but also chronicles a medical profession that failed to protect the public from the spread of prescription fentanyl at a critical moment during the opioid epidemic. Popplewell said only one Toronto area doctor ever went to jail for trafficking fentanyl but as the story details, five other doctors were also linked to the scheme.
Shortly after the story was published, Popplewell received a tip that Otto had escaped while out on bail.
“How could a man who was tried by a jury of his peers and sentenced to 12 years in prison in an Ontario Superior Court get out of jail and flee the country?” asked Popplewell.
He dug into this question with a follow-up piece published in Toronto Life.
Feathertale, No. 26
Popplewell was also nominated in the Best Editorial Package category for The Feathertale Review, issue 26. This is one of three nominations for Feathertale this year, bringing the total number of nominations for the magazine up to 18. Popplewell launched Feathertale while in journalism school at Carleton and has now been editing it for 17 years. Issue 26 of the magazine is a box-set that contains four magazines, presented as one. The printed product featured four different cover options inside a custom-made die cut box.
“As with every issue of Feathertale, we endeavoured to make this one a timeless product that can live on our reader’s bookshelves and coffee tables for years,” Popplewell said. “Reinvention is something we try to do with every issue. Over the course of the last decade Feathertale has presented itself to readers as a literary cookbook, a literary LP and as something that glows in the dark like a night light.“
Feathertale has published submissions from some big names including doodles from Margaret Atwood and a poem from Robert Munsch. A number of Carleton journalism alumni have also contributed.
“The project means a lot to me but it’s a real communal effort to put each issue together,” Popplewell said. “Over the years we’ve published the work of roughly 850 writers, illustrators and designers. I count myself fortunate to have had the chance to collaborate with all of them.”
Popplewell joined the Carleton’s journalism faculty in 2017. His fourth-year courses, Longform journalism, Sports and Freelancing, are highly sought after by students. He is also the founding director of the Future of Journalism Initiative, a collaborative research hub where journalists, academics and students work together on projects meant to improve journalistic practice.
The Feathertale team at the NMAs in 2013 where they won gold for best single issue
Popplewell is no stranger to the National Magazine Awards. Since 2010, he has been nominated 21 times – winning five golds and five silvers. This is the third time he has been nominated in the Investigative Reporting category. He was previously nominated in the category for an investigation into the death of a baseball player When the Game is Gone and for an investigation into the concussion crisis in the CFL, Head Games.
This is Popplewell’s second nomination in the Long-form Feature Writing category. He won gold in the category in 2019 for a feature on the Toronto Star, Final Edition.
Popplewell said he is honoured to be nominated again this year.
“I have a lot of respect for the other nominees,” he said. “The depth of reporting that went into all the nominated stories in the Investigative Reporting and Long-Form Feature Writing categories is inspiring.”
The National Magazine Award winners will be announced on June 3 at a virtual ceremony. See the full list of nominations here.
Thursday, May 5, 2022 in General, Journalism News
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