As February nears, so does the end of Aajah Sauter’s six-month run with the CBC as the recipient of a prestigious 2024 Canadian Journalism Foundation (CFJ) Black Journalism Fellowship.
The recent MacEwan alum wrapped up her Bachelor of Communications Studies with a bang. In 2024, she published 18 pieces in The Griff, MacEwan University’s student publication (including one about her study abroad experience in Amsterdam), completed a remote field placement with The Globe and Mail, and was the only recent grad outside of Ontario to receive the prestigious CJF fellowship.
“It's been quite the year,” said Sauter from a cozy coffee shop on John Street, a six-minute walk from the CBC office. It was still early in her fellowship experience that day in October, and she was just beginning her whirlwind tour of five different CBC radio shows: Front Burner, Marketplace, The Current, Q and Commotion. “It feels cool to be a representative of MacEwan – and Alberta.”
Sauter’s experience with producing actually started in the fall of 2023 during her remote field placement with The Globe and Mail. While working on the news organization's daily podcast, The Decibel, she collaborated with a mentor to produce an episode about hydroelectric dams in Ontario and dating app burnout.
When she started working with CBC’s Front Burner this fall, she got to dig into her passion for culture and film with episodes that looked at the controversial Trump biopic The Apprentice and the billion-dollar influencer culture.
“Sometimes people trivialize culture and arts journalism because politics, business and crime reporting are much more on the forefront of our minds,” she said. While she knows the importance of being informed, she thinks there’s room for more. “We need little interruptions in the news cycle – arts and culture and human interest stories that bring sprinkles of joy. I want to be a part of telling those stories of joy.”
And sometimes, there’s even space to ask difficult questions while covering those joyful stories.
That’s exactly what Sauter did when she teamed up with Emilie Rubayita to produce the Stories of Belonging videos for Black History Month at MacEwan in February 2024. It came a year after Sauter’s Black History Month feature on 5 Artists 1 Love, an organization founded by MacEwan alum Darren Jordan. As Sauter dug into the story, she began asking questions about the challenges Jordan faced and discovered one was getting space outside of Black History Month.
“It felt like everyone was preaching that we care about all people and equality and celebrating our differences, but not actually putting that into action when it comes to cultural events. It didn’t feel good. So I wrote a little bit about it.”
Sauter says it was one of the first times she felt the emotion really come through in her writing. “I think that's the biggest example of a time I was able to speak up for people,” she said. “That’s what journalism gives me – a platform to speak up for people and to tell the stories that go unreported. That’s my big thing.”