“About every 10 seconds, she stuffed a sealed plastic bag of cereal into a passing yellow carton. It could be dangerous work, with fast-moving pulleys and gears that had torn off fingers and ripped open a woman’s scalp.”
That’s the life of 15-year-old Carolina Yoc, packing Cheerios on an assembly line as just one of the surging numbers of underage migrant workers in dangerous low-paid work in the US. She’s someone you’d never know about until she turned up in the lead of what looks like being the most recognised piece of global journalism this year (by prizes, that is): a six-part investigation by Hannah Dreier published in The New York Times.
Last week, Dreier was awarded the top US journalism award, the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. This followed on from her first place finish last month in the investigative journalism category in the richest global award, the Fetisov Journalism Awards. (Disclosure: I am a member of the jury for the Fetisov awards.)
The recognition for her powerful piece — and the changing results in global journalism awards that it reflects — tells us a lot about how journalists think about how journalism is changing and how they judge what makes great journalism right now.
No longer are they chasing the sugar boost of the viral hit that tries to game social media. Now — outside Australia, at least — the best of journalism delivers analysis and context through longer form and in-depth collaborations, featuring people we don’t normally hear from. It’s a form still searching for its identifier: is it slow journalism? Is it solutions journalism? Is it (horror!) activist journalism?
To understand how global journalism is shifting, take a look at the winners and finalists in the big journalist-judged prizes — the US Pulitzers and Peabody Awards (also announced last week), the global Fetisovs and the multi-lingual European Press Prize (with its shortlist announced last month and winners to be released in June).
The significance of these prizes in recognising — and so shaping — modern journalism also shows just how important our own Walkley Awards can be in buttressing independent journalism.
The best journalism, like Dreier’s series, is rising to meet the challenges of the moment — digging into hard-to-report issues like global warming, authoritarian populism, the mass movements of peoples, the racial reckoning, the gender reset. Much of it is happening outside traditional media — and outside the traditional media centres of New York and London — and is driven by mission-focused, even activist, reporters.
Traditional awards — particularly medium-specific awards like the once-print fundamentalist Pulitzers and the once-were radio Peabody Awards — have had to rethink what they identify as great journalism. (The Walkleys have been travelling a decade-long journey of rethinking the hard division between its once traditional medium-specific categories.)
The Pulitzers recognised Chicago’s mission-oriented City Bureau and the Invisible Institute for their in-depth reporting on systemic police mismanagement of missing Black women that blended data and machine learning to analyse police records with community meetings and more than 40 in-depth interviews.
The traditionally print USA Today won a Peabody for public service for its streamed documentary produced with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project on the baby boom resulting from the US Supreme Court’s anti-abortion ruling.
In Venezuela, the Armando.info collective was recognised by the Fetisov Prizes for “Torture is Next Door”, for exposing government-run clandestine torture houses in Caracas.
In announcing its finalists, the European Press Prize, highlighted, across categories, a focus on mental health and abuse with stories about Syrian woman refugees in Denmark, mistreatment in hospitals in Portugal and, from Norway, the impact of TikTok on adolescent mental health.
Increasingly, the awards show that journalists are working collaboratively, following their stories across borders. Among the Fetisov winners was a report on choking air in Kurdistan as a result of burning in oil production produced by the Environmental Reporting Collective, with journalists from Iraq, Malaysia, the United Kingdom and the USA.
Another, from Latin America’s Inquire First Collective, reported on the enduring pollution that resulted from the 1970s discovery of oil in Peru’s upper Amazon.
These awards remind how great journalism is continuing to expose the link between corruption and authoritarian populism. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project is being recognised by the European Press Prize for their work on The Rotenberg Files, a cache of leaked emails that expose corrupt links between Russian oligarchs and Putin’s government.
Coda Story’s Anna-Catherine Brigida was recognised in the Fetisov Awards for her reporting on the ugly links between the surveillance technology industry and the Honduras government to protect the drug trade.
Journalism awards — particularly independent journalist-run and -judged prizes like Australia’s Walkleys — play a key role in buttressing the infrastructure of an independent media. They tell us what each generation of journalists thinks of as the best of the craft. They offer an algorithm-free search for readers to discover the best of journalists’ work.
They are also valuable tools for solidarity — like this year’s Pulitzer recognition of journalists reporting on and from Gaza or, more locally, the Walkley recognition of Julian Assange. This year, the Peabody for news was won by Bisan Owda’s video and audio streams from Gaza for AJ+, chillingly titled “It’s Bisan from Gaza and I’m Still Alive”, while the documentary prize went to 20 Days in Mariupol, which won the documentary Oscar back in March.
As a former trustee of the Walkleys, I know how contingent journalism awards are. The Walkleys have survived a number of near death experiences (including a few attempts at knee-capping by News Corp’s hatchet-men). But we’d all be a lot less informed if they were gone.
