Patrick Cain

Data Journalist

Toronto

Contact

July 2021: Patrick Cain is no longer with the company.

Patrick Cain is a part-time freelance journalist with CTVNews.ca.

He has been an online writer and editor in Toronto since 2001, at thestar.com, Open File, and most recently globalnews.ca, where he was a national online reporter until August of 2020.

As well as traditional reporting techniques, he has experience in data journalism, access-to-information requests and maps and visualizations. One FOI request, started at the Star, ended six years later when he was at Global with a favourable Supreme Court decision. The decision changed an aspect of Canadian freedom-of-information law which has to do with the burden of proof that has to be met by government bodies wanting to use a law-enforcement exemption.

At Global, he developed microbeats around digital privacy, gun control, online disinformation and cannabis. More recently, along with many other reporters, he focused on the data side of the coronavirus pandemic.

He has a degree in journalism from Ryerson University, and another in history from the University of Toronto.

With whatever time is left over after parenting three children in a global pandemic, he enjoys wilderness canoeing, cross-country skiing, hiking and working on fixing up a house in the east end of Toronto.

He speaks English.

For 2014, he won three RTDNA awards for data storytelling, and was shortlisted for best personal portfolio at the Global Editors Network's Data Journalism Awards. For 2015, he won the RTDNA data storytelling award for Ontario, was shortlisted for the same award for the Prairies, and shared a Canadian Medical Association journalism award with another reporter.

For 2017, he was shortlisted for the RTDNA data storytelling award for Ontario for one story, and won the national RTDNA network award (with some help from Fred Vallance-Jones’s students at King’s) for another.

For much of 2010, he was a contributing editor at openfile.ca, where his Poppy File project, which mapped Toronto’s Second World War deaths at the household level, won a Canadian Online Publishing Award and was shortlisted for an Online News Association award and a National Magazine Award.


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