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Maeve Ellis was interested in journalism long before she started as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto. Instead of starting a program in journalism once she left high school, the class of 2026 graduand chose a pair of Faculty of Arts and Sciences majors that would prepare her for the contemporary newsroom.

“I chose economics and history because I wanted to understand how the world works,” Ellis said in a recent interview. “Economics taught me how to analyze information and data, and history taught me how to read texts critically and analyze source material. Together, they gave me a really strong foundation for research and storytelling.”

In a world where the term ‘evidence-based’ is often just a catch phrase, Ellis knows exactly what it means and has already started applying to her trade. Three years on the staff of the Varsity, combined with an internship at the Investigative Journalism Foundation gave Ellis an audience for sharing data-driven work that centres what is factual, methodologically sound and proven.

“I’ve written several articles that were built entirely on the data analysis skills I learned in U of T economics courses,” she said. For one piece, I analyzed City of Toronto data on waterfowl counts at beaches and found a significant decline in bird populations. The process involved doing the analysis myself and then speaking to experts to verify it, which is very similar to what we do in investigative journalism.” [Read more…]