2014 Annual Report

Nieman Fellows in the class of 1964 established the Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism in May 1964 to honor the Nieman curator who retired that year. The award recognizes displays of conscience and integrity by individuals, groups or institutions in communications.

2014 Winner: Pamela Colloff, executive editor at the Texas Monthly, for her tenacious investigations into wrongful convictions, which have exposed deep flaws in the criminal justice system.

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Watch a video of Colloff’s acceptance speech

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2015 Winner: Turkish journalist and writer Hasan Cemal for his long career dedicated to championing freedom of the press in Turkey and as a representative of all Turkish journalists working today under increasingly difficult conditions.

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The $10,000 Taylor Award encourages fairness in news coverage by American journalists and news organizations. Members of the Taylor family, who published The Boston Globe from 1872 to 1999, established the award in 2001. Finalists receive $1,000 each.

Winner: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for Deadly Delays, a comprehensive watchdog investigation that revealed how delays in newborn screening programs at hospitals across the country have put babies at risk of disability and death from rare diseases often treatable when caught and treated early

Finalists:

• The Wall Street Journal for Trials: A Desperate Fight to Save Kids and Change Science, a six-year investigation by reporter Amy Dockser Marcus into the lives of families and scientists fighting a rare and fatal genetic disease
• Tampa Bay Times and The Center for Investigative Reporting for America’s Worst Charities, a collaborative investigation that exposed the 50 worst charities in the United States and how they operate

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Watch the award presentation and panel discussion with the winners and finalists

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

Winner: The Sacramento Bee for the five-part series Nevada Patient Busing, an investigation that found that over the course of five years, the Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital in Las Vegas transported more than 1,500 mentally ill patients out of Nevada by bus, sending at least one person to every state in the continental United States. Many were sent away without plans for treatment or housing and in some cases, to cities where they had no personal contacts.

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Watch the award presentation and speech by Bee reporters Cynthia Hubert and Phillip Reese

Established in 1998, the Lukas Prize Project honors the best in American nonfiction writing.

Co-administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation, the project is sponsored by the family of the late Mark Lynton, a historian and senior executive at the firm Hunter Douglas in the Netherlands.

The J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize ($10,000)

• Winner: Sheri Fink for “Five Days at Memorial,” her investigation of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital in the wake of Hurricane Katrina
• Finalist: Jonathan M. Katz for “The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster”

The Mark Lynton History Prize ($10,000)

• Winner: Jill Lepore, for “Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin”
• Finalist: Christopher Clark for “The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914”

The J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award ($30,000)

• Winner: Adrienne Berard for “When Yellow Was Black: The untold story of the first fight for desegregation in Southern schools”
• Finalist: Yochi J. Dreazen for “The Invisible Front: Love and Loss in an Era of Endless War”

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The Morris Lecture is presented annually by an American overseas correspondent or commentator on foreign affairs who is invited to Harvard to discuss international reporting.

2014 Lecturer: New York Times senior photographer Tyler Hicks who covers stories around the world. In 2014, he won the Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Photography for his coverage of the massacre at the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya, and in 2009, was part of the Times team that won the Pulitzer for International Reporting in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

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Watch the Morris Lecture by Hicks

Read 5 Questions for Tyler Hicks on Nieman Storyboard

Read Why Journalists Take the Risk to Report from Dangerous Places by Tyler Hicks in Nieman Reports, an excerpt from his Morris Lecture.

Established in 2008, the I.F. Stone Medal recognizes journalistic independence and honors the life of investigative journalist I.F. Stone. The award is presented annually to a journalist whose work captures the spirit of independence, integrity, courage and indefatigability that characterized I.F. Stone’s Weekly, published from 1953 to 1971.

Winner: Laura Poitras, documentary film director, journalist and artist and co-founder of First Look Media’s The Intercept, for her reporting exposing the massive illegal NSA surveillance program disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, which is the subject of her film CITIZENFOUR

Lifetime Achievement Recipient: Amy Goodman, investigative journalist, author and longtime host and executive producer of “Democracy Now!” for her body of work as a journalist and independent media advocate who has fought vigilantly for a free press and has ensured that her reporting would always be done in service of speaking truth to power

The Nieman Foundation will honor Poitras and Goodman in a ceremony on Feb. 5, 2015.

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