March has been a month of international recognition for ICIJ’s global team of investigative journalists, who have been honored as finalists and award-winners in two countries for two different projects.
On Monday the Scripps Howard Foundation named the ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks project winner of the William Brewster Styles Award for Business/Economic reporting for “Secrecy for Sale: Inside the Global Offshore Money.”
Judges applauded the 18-month project that has revealed more than 120,000 names and companies in a hidden parallel economy of offshore tax havens, and has prompted multiple international tax investigations.
"Everything about 'Secrecy for Sale' is huge – its global scale, its enormous team of reporters and media partners, and the difficulty of their task: digging out facts that have been carefully hidden behind multiple screens,” the judges’ comments said.
“How do you cover an international industry, known only to the super-rich, that amounts to an alternate global economy based on moving money and evading national regulation and taxation? How do you analyze 2.5 million files, coordinate with 112 journalists and 42 media partners?
“The skill set applied by CPI and its ICIJ division matched the scope of the story, from data mining to jaw-droppingly good writing, to impact."
The first place honor carries a $10,000 prize.
The ICIJ’s parent organization, the Center for Public Integrity, was also honored for "Toxic Clout,” a year-long series of stories exploring conflicts in the world of chemical science.
“The Center for Public Integrity is truly honored to have two of its major investigative projects honored by the Scripps Howard Foundation,” said William Buzenberg, the Center’s executive director.
“This important work on the growing use of global tax havens, and the lack of regulation of dangerous toxic chemicals in our environment, are representative of the depth and excellence in our most compelling work.”
Established in 1953, the Scripps Howard Foundation’s awards recognize outstanding print, broadcast and online journalism in 15 categories. The winners will be honored at a May 22 dinner in Cincinnati.
Earlier in the month the ICIJ was also in India to receive the Karpoor Chandra Kulish (KCK) International Award for Excellence in Print Journalism for the 2012 series “Skin and Bone: The Shadowy Trade in Human Body Parts.”
“Skin and Bone” was an eight-month project across 11 countries. ICIJ found the business of recycling dead humans had grown so large over the past decade that you could buy stock in publicly traded companies that relied on corpses for their raw materials. You can read the full investigation on our website or download the e-book.
ICIJ’s project research manager and member from Spain Mar Cabra was in Jaipur to accept the $11,000 prize from the Rajasthan Patrika Group, one of the largest Hindi paper groups in India.
At the beginning of the month, ICIJ’s “Secrecy for Sale” project was also named as a finalist for the prestigious Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. The Center for Public Integrity took out the award with its series “Breathless and Burdened: Dying from Black Lung, Buried by Law and Medicine.”
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