John Michael McGrath, Former OpenFile Toronto curator

John Michael McGrath, Former OpenFile Toronto curator

Original nomination:

John Michael McGrath, Former OpenFile Toronto curator

Original nomination:

I nominate John Michael McGrath for the JSource Newsperson of the Year award. John's a rare breed as a journalist: He knows so much about municipal and provincial politics, but he's also able to explain things in layman's terms for the rest of us (and readers) to understand. I got to work with John at OpenFile for a number of months where I witnessed him break stories that the Mainstream Media would later report because John reported them. Since OpenFile's hiatus, John continues to cover Toronto Mayor Rob Ford's conflict of interest case. If he's not tweeting, he's blogging about issues on his own blog, some of which the mainstream media again picks up on. Perhaps that's John's biggest strength: His mix of old-school journalism with new technologies (e.g. social media). If John's not Newsperson of the Year, I don't know who is.

Links:

John Michael McGrath's personal blog