Citizen reporter headed to Sun

Gordon Hoekstra, one of the Prince George's Citizen award-winning investigative reporter, is leaving the newspaper to take a position with the Vancouver Sun.

Hoekstra is a 19-year veteran of the newsroom who began reporting as a summer intern. His final day at the paper is July 15.

Hoekstra is among Northern B.C.'s most-decorated journalists. His series Dying for Work, an investigation into the deaths of logging truck drivers in north and central B.C., earned him the 2006 Michener Award, Canada's highest honour for public service journalism. The series also garnered that year's Jack Webster Award, B.C.'s foremost journalism prize, in the community reporting category along with a nomination for the 2005 National Newspaper Award, considered Canada's equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, and a nomination for a Canadian Association of Journalists investigative award in the community category.

Hoekstra picked up his second Webster in 2010 in the business, industry and economics reporting category for Pipeline promise?, a six-part series about Enbridge's proposal to build a $5.5-billion pipeline across Northern B.C. that will carry crude from Alberta's oilsands for export to Asia.

He was also a 2007 Webster finalist for his series Cleaning the Air, which focused on air quality in Prince George. The series earned him that year's National Newspaper Award for local reporting. It also received a nomination for a 2007 Canadian Association of Journalists investigative award in the community category.

Hoekstra would win the CAJ's Don McGillvray Award, which recognizes the country's foremost investigative journalist that year, in 2009, for Downtown fix, which examined years of unsuccessful revitalization efforts in Prince George's core. The series also secured the CAJ's investigative award in the community category.

His career also includes NNA local reporting nominations in 2002, 2003, and 2008 for coverage of the softwood lumber dispute, the province's controversial sale of B.C. Rail, and the state of the forest industry in Northern B.C. Most recently, he was nominated for a CAJ for his series on the troubled Prince George Metis Housing Society.

Hoekstra started his career as a part-time reporter for the Burnaby/New Westminister News in 1991 after graduating with a journalism degree from Vancouver Community College.