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ICIJ investigations honored with top journalism prizes

ICIJ’s Evicted and Abandoned and Fatal Extraction investigations have been honored with 2015 Overseas Press Club awards.

ICIJ’s Evicted and Abandoned and Fatal Extraction investigations have been honored with 2015 Overseas Press Club awards, presented last week at a ceremony in New York City. The prizes are a leading recognition for journalism on international affairs.

The Evicted and Abandoned project won the Whitman Bassow Award for reporting on international environmental issues, while Fatal Extraction was honored for the Best Multimedia News Presentation.

The Evicted and Abandoned investigation revealed that development projects funded by the World Bank physically or economically displaced an estimated 3.4 million people over the last decade.  During this period, the bank regularly failed to follow its own rules for protecting displaced communities from abuses and ensuring that they are adequately resettled, found ICIJ, the Huffington Post and a team of more than 50 journalists from 21 countries.

Fatal Extraction uncovered a pattern of deaths, displacement and injuries associated with Australian mining operations in Africa. The reporting team, which brought together more than a dozen reporters across Africa, found that poorly regulated Australian companies were linked to law-breaking and negligence that experts said would never be tolerated in other jurisdictions.

The award recognized a multimedia presentation by ICIJ’s Will Fitzgibbon, and Eleanor Bell Fox and Chris Zubak-Skees of the Center for Public Integrity, that allowed viewers to explore video, text and original documents in an immersive online experience.

The Overseas Press Club awards are among several recent awards that ICIJ has received for projects that emphasized on-the-ground and multimedia storytelling.

Evicted and Abandoned won an award for Feature Photography from the Society of Professional Journalists for images taken by ICIJ photographers in displaced communities around the world (see a selection of the Evicted and Abandoned photos here), announced on April 22.

Evicted and Abandoned also received a 2016 Excellence in Financial Journalism award from the New York State Society of Certified Professional Accountants, announced on April 21.

Watch the Overseas Press Club acceptance speeches:

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