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Evicted and Abandoned investigation wins top award

The project by ICIJ, HuffPost and partners has been awarded a prize for innovative investigative journalism from the Online News Association.

Evicted and Abandoned

ICIJ, The Huffington Post and other media partners have been awarded a top honor at the 2015 Online Journalism Awards hosted by the Online News Association in Los Angeles, California.

The Evicted and Abandoned investigation was awarded the Al Neuharth Innovation in Investigative Journalism Award, Large, after it revealed how the World Bank Group, the powerful development lender committed to ending poverty, has regularly failed to follow its own rules for protecting vulnerable populations.

ICIJ teamed up with more than 50 journalists from 21 countries to document the bank’s lapses and show their consequences for people around the globe. The reporting team traveled to affected communities in more than a dozen countries – including indigenous hamlets in the Peruvian Andes, fishing settlements along India’s northwest coast and a war-scarred village in Kosovo’s coal-mining belt.

The first six major stories were co-published on an innovative microsite hosted by the Huffington Post, featuring in-depth stories, an interactive database of World Bank projects, powerful photography and videos from displaced communities across the planet. The investigation is ongoing, and more stories will be published in the coming weeks.

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The OJA prize was tied, and honors were shared with ProPublica and NPR for the Insult to Injury investigation into workers’ compensation in America.

ICIJ’s parent organization the Center for Public Integrity were also honored at the award cermony with the Al Neuharth Innovation in Investigative Journalism Award, Small, for its Profiting from Prisoners investigation.

The two-part series examined how financial companies, private vendors, and corrections agencies increasingly charge high fees and shift the costs of basic necessities onto families of prison inmates in the United States.

The awards mark the second straight year of ONA honors for the Center for Public Integrity. In 2014, the Center won the award for General Excellence in Journalism, small category for digital storytelling and use of technology. The Center won two awards out of a total of seven finalists for awards in six categories. 

Launched in 2000, the Online Journalism Awards (OJA) recognize excellence in digital journalism, with a focus on independent, community, nonprofit, academic and major media.

Congratulations to all of this year’s winners.

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