Barrhaven Independent’s From the Other Side named top column in province

The Barrhaven Independent has had another big year at the 2022 Ontario Community Newspaper Association’s annual Better Newspaper Competition.

The annual competition is judged by some of the top journalists and professors in the country. The best submissions from among the more than 200 community newspapers in the province are judged each year. The top three finalists in each category were named in February, with the winners announced last Friday.

The judging window for the 2022 awards was for material published between Sept. 2021 and Sept. 2022.

Jeff Morris was named the OCNA Columnist of the Year for his ‘From the Other Side’ column, which runs on page 6 in the Barrhaven Independent. It marks the second time he has been named the top columnist in the province. He is also a two-time Ontario humour columnist of the year award, and a two-time winner of the Stephen Shaw Award as Ontario’s Reporter of the Year. He has been among the three finalists for either the Column of the Year or Humour Column of the Year awards in 13 of the last 16 years.

Chris Foulds, editor of Kamloops This Week and a former Columnist of the Year in BC, called Morris’s From the Other Side columns “well written columns that flow extremely well. And the topics are compelling.”

Jim Poling of the Minden Times was second in the category, while Laurie Weir of the Perth Courier was third.

A feature story written by Morris was a finalist in two categories.

In November, 2021, the Barrhaven Independent ran a feature story on how 100 years ago, farms in and around Barrhaven played an essential role in a secret distillery near Manotick and was part of a complex bootlegging operation run by notorious gang-