With Jana Pruden, Winner of the 2025 Landsberg Award
Jana G. Pruden is an award-winning feature writer at The Globe and Mail in Canada, and the host and co-creator of the hit narrative podcast series, In Her Defence and In Her Defence: 50th Street.
Jana’s longform and narrative writing has been recognized internationally, including with multiple awards and citations from the National Newspaper Awards, the Canadian Association of Journalists, and the Canadian Journalism Foundation. Her writing has also appeared on Longform and Longreads, and in magazines such as The Walrus and Reader’s Digest.
Jana is the former crime bureau chief of the Edmonton Journal, and previously worked at the Regina Leader-Post, the Medicine Hat News, the Prairie Post and the Interlake Spectator. She is also a sessional journalism instructor at MacEwan University and Pandemic University Pop-Up School of Writing. She was a 2024 Ochberg fellow at Columbia University’s Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma.
A frequent presenter on issues related to journalism, nonfiction writing, and crime reporting, Jana delivered the 2020 Minifie Lecture at the University of Regina’s School of Journalism. That lecture, entitled Give Me Rewrite: Drafting a New Future for Journalism, can be watched on video here, or read here.
Her Lougheed College Lecture, The Misery Beat: The Ethics of Reporting on Crime and Human Suffering, can be found here. It is also available in print from Hingston & Olson.
Jana is a member of the Métis Nation of Alberta, and lives in Edmonton.
Transcript
00:00:01 Louise
Hello, and welcome to Season 8 of the Canadian Women's Foundation podcast, Alright, Now What?
Gender equality and justice, where we live, work, learn, and play is the goal, and it makes life better for everyone. Alright, Now What? remains a space where we ask: how do we move from awareness to action? But this season, we're also shifting the story. Through powerful storytelling, expert interviews, and bold conversations, we'll explore what true equity can look like, especially for those who are too often silenced or overlooked.
The work of the Canadian Women's Foundation and its partners takes place on traditional First Nations, Inuit, and Metis territories. We are grateful for the opportunity to meet and work on this land. However, we recognize that land acknowledgments are not enough. We need to pursue truth, reconciliation, decolonization, and allyship in an ongoing effort to make right with all our relations.
00:01:07 Louise
I'm Louise O'Shea at the Canadian Women's Foundation.
Today, we're joined by award-winning journalist Jana Pruden, whose reporting shines a light on gender-based violence and how these cases move through our justice system.
Jana shares how her work in court reporting led her to focus on intimate partner violence and why telling these stories accurately and ethically matters so much.
We'll explore the responsibility journalists carry in an age of misinformation and the power of storytelling to help us understand what is really at stake.
And finally, Jana leaves us with practical ways we can all support facts-based journalism and stay engaged in building change.
Jana, we are so thrilled to have you today on Alright, Now What? Thank you so much for being here with us.
00:02:02 Jana
Thank you so much for inviting me.
00:02:05 Louise
So obviously, Jana, we know you because you won the Landsberg Award. How did it feel to add that to your list of accolades?
00:02:16 Jana
That was just such a huge, huge honour. You know, I don't put stock in all awards. And it's always nice to win awards, but I always tell other reporters and also tell myself when I don't win something that that's not the measure of whether a story is great or not, and that's not a measure of your work. But the Landsberg was particularly meaningful to me because women's issues are something that I really do try to put a lot of emphasis on in my work. And from the namesake of the award herself to all of the past winners are these journalists that I admire so much and who I know that their work has really changed the conversation, the understanding of women's issues in Canada. So it truly was quite an honour to be included in that company alongside the producer of our podcast, Kasia Mychajlowycz.
00:03:14 Louise
Well, congratulations again. We were thrilled that you were recognized with that. And so what drew you to covering and really focusing on women's issues in your journalism and podcasting?
00:03:31 Jana
You know, the first domestic homicide that I covered was quite early in my career when I was a reporter at the Medicine Hat News. And in the years that followed, I started to be a court reporter when I moved to the Regina Leader Post and then coming here to the Edmonton Journal. And it is covering court that some of these social issues and legal injustice issues really started to stick out to me and become a major area of interest. And specifically in the area of intimate partner violence because covering court, I saw it pretty much on a daily basis. I have covered truly more domestic homicides, more intimate partner homicides than I care to count. I did actually at one point sit down and try to count them, and then I just stopped because it was getting too depressing.
And then also covering a lot of mass violence events, which I have helped cover, including the Portapique shooting, the massacre on the James Smith Cree Nation, some multiple family murders that we had here in Edmonton that often had intimate partner violence at the core of them or as an inciting incident. And then meanwhile, in those years that I've been a reporter, I've gone from being in my early 20s to being in my early 50s. And so I've not only seen these issues really come to the forefront in my work, but I've also seen them in my life as I've had people in my life become victims of intimate partner violence, of sexual violence, of workplace harassment, of all of these various things that women can face.
And so it really has engaged me both on a personal level and in my work that these are really important issues and really important stories and ones that I want to tell and that I truly believe in.
00:05:26 Louise
It's also really brave to cover these stories. And so thank you for doing that on behalf of women across Canada. How do you cope? I mean, you've just said that you can't even count the number of cases that you've had to sit through. I can't even imagine the interviews that you have gone through and what you've heard in that time. How does that affect you as Jana?
00:05:56 Jana
You know I just consider it such a privilege to be able to share someone's story and that someone will trust me with their story to then share it with the world.
When we were working on season 2 of our podcast, I interviewed Marion Buller, who had chaired the inquiry into National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls . And that's actually a question that I had for her. In that inquiry, they heard hundreds, thousands of pieces of testimony from people about the murder of their loved ones, about the missing loved ones that weren't really searched for, and just the most heart-wrenching stories. And she said that in that work that she started to view the stories as a sacred gift. And that the receiving of the story is something sacred, and that was really a paradigm shift for her in hearing these stories, and I think…in a slightly different way, but not entirely different, is how I've always viewed these stories being shared with me.
You know, right now I've been working on a story throughout the fall of a young Indigenous boy named Samuel Bird who disappeared in Edmonton and it's now confirmed that he was the victim of a homicide and someone's been charged. And a lot of people have asked me about this case and said, you know, it must be so hard to cover and there's so many aspects of it that are very heart-wrenching. But to me, truly all of the credit goes to Samuel's mother, Alanna Bird, who has put herself out there to share her story with me, has spent time with me, and other reporters as well, and has really given us that gift so that we can tell the story. And I think in so many of the stories that I tell, even when they are terrible, Helen Naslund, the the subject of season one of In Her Defence, a woman who killed her abusive husband and was sentenced to 18 years in prison. You know, that is truly one of the most horrific stories of abuse that I have ever heard in my life. What they were living with and her descriptions of some of her day-to-day life were truly, truly wrenching and very difficult to hear. But then I focus on that here is this woman who has survived it, and who is motivated to share her story to help other people. I think that's what's so beautiful is that so many people, they want to share their story so that it can help others, and it does help others. So when I start to feel them… The weight of it, that's really what I focus on. And I know that it does help
I have heard the stories of… you know, you may see in the background behind me is a neon sign turned off right now, but it says, stories will save us. And that is something that I truly believe. And it gives me a lot of comfort when I'm dealing with really heavy material.
00:09:01 Louise
If you could shift the story on how people think about issues for women and marginalized communities in Canada from coast to coast to coast, what would you highlight and why?
00:09:16 Jana
Yeah, I think a narrative that is really important to me, or something that's really important to me that I come back to again and again and again, is around the issue of intimate partner violence and intimate partner homicide. And that's because of covering more homicides of almost entirely women by male partners. It's not only, but the numbers are vastly, vastly disproportionate in terms of gender. And that these homicides are predictable. They have many factors that come up before them and that they have many red flags that we can see that often are a parent before an intimate partner homicide, patterns that are very predictable, and that I do believe there are ways to disrupt this pattern and to, I believe that the vast majority of these are preventable homicides because we can see in so many cases, the train barreling down the track towards that ending. And I just don't accept that nothing can be done to disrupt that when we can see it days, months, years in advance. And the number of people that I have talked to who have had a woman in their family murdered, a friend murdered, and they say, "I always knew this would happen. I always knew, I always worried about this." I hear this time and time and time again. And I think the thing that I would like to change is this perception that I think still really exists, consciously or not, that intimate partner homicide, domestic homicide, is a matter behind closed doors, that this is something that happens inside a house and it's not the rest of our business or, okay, well, that's just between them. And it's not.
And even in a very, a self-protection way, we should care about this because as I mentioned, Portapique, James Smith Cree Nation, there are many, many, many, many cases where the domestic homicide is the inciting incident of a large-scale incident where multiple people die, strangers, police officers, friends, family, neighbors. So it truly is a… it affects everybody there's a line in season one that we say, and that's very true, and I've said it to a lot of people since, which is that, this issue affects you. Someone in your life is going through this. You may not know it.
And, you know, I even had someone after season one came out, because of that line, he said to me there's no one in my life that's gone through domestic violence. I don't think that line is right. And I said, no, there's no one in your life who's felt safe to share with you their experience with domestic violence.
So if I could shift the narrative on one thing, it would really be to promote a new understanding of the threat that intimate partner violence poses to all of us at large and try to get people engaged with thinking about how can we disrupt these trains going down the track towards violence and the number of lives that we could save, the number of children we could save. I think that is a broader frustration that weighs on me, that people, women, children, other people continue to die and we don't seem to take appropriate steps to try to change the ending.
I do think it's possible.
00:13:18 Louise
It reminds me deeply of a campaign that we at the Canadian Women's Foundation created a few years back called Signal for Help. I don't know if you're aware of it…Yes. And it's, but it's almost like that's the last step. We don't want things to get to the point where there isn't anyone else in your life and you're looking at strangers on the street or someone in the car next to you or whatever it may be sort of using the signal or saying you need help to get out of your current situation.
00:13:53 Jana
Thank you and there is something that I wanted to add there. And that's such a powerful campaign, such an important campaign. But it touches on another thing that frustrates me a little bit. You know, when I talk, I often talk, like get invited to different, speaking at a conference next week about intimate partner violence. And so often, it's all women in the room. There's like one guy, right? And same with the Signal for Help. It's like, I see it shared on my social media constantly. It's all my female friends sharing it. And I think that's amazing, I'm so glad that women are doing this work and that women are protecting each other and women are being really watchful about other women who need help. But I often come back to where are the men? And we really do need to engage men on this issue because I think men have to help each other. That's one thing, you know, when there's struggles after a breakup of a relationship, the woman's leaving, and often the man is visibly struggling. So where are the people around him? Who's helping him as he becomes more and more dangerous? And I guess that speaks to, again, that this is a society issue. It's not a women's issue.
Women are doing the lion's share of the work on it. And again, I love that we're doing that, but where are the men? We need the men to be part of this because it is not just a women's issue. It's an everybody issue.
00:15:28 Louise
In your experience, Jana, what are some of the biggest challenges and barriers in facts-based journalism today.
00:15:40 Jana
The barriers that we face as journalists and there's the barriers that we face really as a society with people trying to figure out what's real and what's not real and what are facts and what are not facts. I feel like this could, I could give a dissertation on the various challenges. But there are many, from having our work, ripped off, which happens to me all the time, and ends up on a podcast or being cut and pasted into sort of a predatory page that's just trying to get clicks or whatever. And often things taken out of context or changed that then, you know, these are real people that the stories are about and a lot of these sites are not using the same ethical approach and ethical framework that I personally consider to be a really important aspect of my work. And then we do have this real problem in I guess what the future of facts are going to be and what the future of truth is going to be.
The Samuel Bird case, which I just mentioned, is a really good example of that. There's a ton of false stories circulating, malicious hoaxes, people who are just trying to help but are complicating it. And the lead homicide detective in that case has said that actually this social media discussion about the case actually put their investigation in serious jeopardy numerous times. So I think that's a big challenge and something that I really think about, not only in regard to my work, but in regard to, these are real people. And when they become the center of some kind of internet, true crime thing, it's very harmful and potentially extremely serious for for the case itself.
00:17:47 Louise
What are some, to kind of combat that and the challenges, what are some of the solutions that you've seen or be a part of that you feel hopeful about or you think are working?
00:17:59 Jana
That's a good question. I mean, I'm like in the muck of a story about that right now. So maybe it's not my time to sound super optimistic about it. But I do…I'm a true believer in journalism. I really am. And I'm a true believer in true stories and facts and the truth. And so I guess I do remain hopeful, and there's lots of mechanisms by which this might be accomplished. You know, there was a story in the Globe and Mail the other day about new technology that the Globe is working with camera companies that would develop essentially a birth certificate for an image so that you can see if the image has been manipulated or not. So, you know, I think there may be interesting tools and technical options for all the different ways we need to fight misinformation, right? How do we hold the social media platforms to account because there's so much being spread there? How do we, you know, combat that with, for instance, images, videos, audio, all of those things that can be manipulated? Of course, it's getting exponentially more complicated with AI now and all of the things that you can make appear to be real when they're not. But outside of how it may be accomplished, I do truly hope and believe that maybe we're getting to a point where people want to accomplish it, where people want to know the truth and want to know, you know, find the real information. And so, yeah, I don't know, how is that being done? I think there's a lot of people thinking about it, and I think for me, I'm, you know, not a computer programmer, but I feel that what I can do is to keep telling stories, keep telling true stories, keep trying to make sure that they are true and accurate. Before we got on the call today, I was fact-checking a story I'm working on. I tell journalism students now, like you have no room for error. You can't make mistakes because every single… and we do make mistakes, we're human. Even non-humans make mistakes. AI makes tons of mistakes. But even spelling… one letter in someone's name wrong can actually just give people a lever to say that the rest of the work is not true or to try to poke holes in what you've done.
So I think it's a great responsibility that we have as journalists and I do truly I truly hope that as people, we do care about the truth and that we want to fight misinformation. How that's going to be accomplished, that's a complicated one.
00:20:54 Louise
So Jana, Alright, now what? How can each of us in this community, everyone listening, take action or get involved in supporting facts-based journalism?
00:21:07 Jana
You know, I think that's a matter of support, literally supporting facts-based journalism. You know, people can buy a subscription to something. It's funny, sometimes I'll have a story up and people are outraged that there's a paywall. You know, often there's sales going on. It's like $5 a month to get a month of digital access, and I always say like, it's worth it, I promise. A latte costs like $8 right now. It's fine. There's actually a lot of content there. And literally this work cannot happen without being supported. So when you look at some of the investigations I do, or both seasons of In Her Defence, these are months, even years in the making. So getting subscriptions to places, being really thoughtful about where you're consuming, what you're consuming and where you're consuming it from.
I think a lot about the idea of sort of an information diet that we, and that's not my concept, I heard it somewhere and it's just stuck in my brain, but we think about what we're putting in our bodies physically and that we don't eat candy four meals a day, every day, or that if we do, it has consequences. And I think there's a lot to be said with thinking about what you're actually intaking in terms of information.But yeah, I think the main thing to do is to read real journalism, subscribe to real journalism, and also find voices who you trust and look at who they're reading.
And there's, you know, people have, I think, a temptation to glamorized journalism of the past. I hear this all the time, both from people in newsrooms and from outside of newsrooms that, the 80s was like this wonderful time. There was all this money, the papers. I used to deliver papers in the 80s when I was a child and they were like 2 inches thick. But if you go back and look at those papers, which you can do, you can find them on many digital databases, look at them, the full PDFs of the pages, they were not wonderful. There's a lot of mistakes in them. There's a lot of filler in them. There's a lot of things that aren't that valuable in them. There's great stories too, great writing, great investigation. But I think that some of the journalism that is being done right now, it's truly like the greatest journalism that's ever been done in the history of the world.
The tools that we have for data analysis, I think, our sophistication and understanding in terms of things like trauma-informed interviewing techniques, being able to tell stories in narrative and engaging ways. All the platforms that we have, all the access that we have to make sure that we do have facts right. I'm astounded every single day of the things that I have access to read and listen to and watch.
So I think keeping that in mind, I think some people sort of like, oh, well, you know, journalism's dead and so I'm just gonna watch this YouTube video about cats or whatever. And there's actually a lot of wonderful journalism being done that… truly some of the greatest journalism in the history of the world and it's worth intaking and is also worth supporting.
00:24:41 Louise
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