Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism

“Alone and Exploited,” by New York Times reporter Hannah Dreier is winner of the 2023 Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism. Dreier’s hard-hitting investigation exposed the staggering scope of America’s hidden migrant child workforce and examined the policy failures and willful disregard by government administrators and corporations alike that allowed children to work in dangerous, sometimes life-threatening conditions in violation of child labor laws.

Dreier found migrant children, many who had entered the country as unaccompanied minors, working in all 50 states, often making household products for companies including Fruit of the Loom, Ford, General Mills, J. Crew, and Ben & Jerry’s. They held jobs in factories, on construction sites and in slaughterhouses, sometimes working overnight shifts to earn money to send to their families back home and often while trying to go to school. The reporting swiftly led to important government and corporate reforms.

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The $20,000 Worth Bingham Prize honors investigative reporting of stories of national significance where the public interest is being ill-served.

These stories may involve state, local or national government, lobbyists or the press itself, wherever an “atmosphere of easy tolerance” exists, as journalist Worth Bingham himself once described public misconduct in his reporting on the nation’s capital.

The investigative reporting may cover actual violations of the law, rule or code; lax or ineffective administration or enforcement; or activities that create conflicts of interest, entail excessive secrecy or otherwise raise questions of propriety.

Judges for the annual prize are guided by such factors as obstacles overcome in obtaining information, accuracy, clarity of analysis and writing style, magnitude of the situation, and impact on the public, including any reforms that may have resulted.

Applications for the 2024 Bingham Prize are now being accepted. The deadline for submissions is January 22, 2025.

For more information, please email the award coordinator Christine Kaye at christine_kaye@harvard.edu.

Journalist Worth Bingham, a 1954 graduate of Harvard College, served three years as a Navy Officer before working as a reporter, first in Minneapolis and then in San Francisco.

He joined the Washington bureau of the Louisville Courier Journal and Times in 1961, where his reporting included, among other things, a series on “Our Costly Congress,” which was widely reprinted and earned him a Headliner Award from the National Headliner Club.

After two years in the paper’s Washington bureau, he returned to Louisville to join the executive staff, and became assistant to the publisher. Married, with two children, he was also active in numerous civic endeavors at the time of his death in 1966.

The Worth Bingham Prize was established in 1967 to commemorate Bingham’s work. The Nieman Foundation took over the administration of the award in 2008. The annual budget is covered by funds donated to Harvard that include past donations from family friends, classmates, fellow journalists and foundations.