Journalism Awards

The Nieman Foundation presents six journalism awards each year to honor exceptional reporting produced by journalists around the world.

Louis Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism

The annual Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity recognizes the work of exceptional journalists and journalism organizations worldwide. Nieman Fellows in the class of 1964 established the award to honor the Nieman curator who retired that year.

Yang Jisheng

Yang Jisheng

2016 Winner: Chinese journalist and author Yang Jisheng, in recognition of his ambitious, fearless reporting and his groundbreaking book “Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine 1958-1962,” which chronicles in forensic detail the true scale of one of the greatest human catastrophes of the 20th century. It is a grim and sobering account of the Great Leap Forward policy implemented under Mao Zedong, which led to the death of some 36 million Chinese, primarily by starvation but also torture and murder.

Read the press release

Hasan Cemal

Hasan Cemal

Last year’s Lyons Award winner, Turkish journalist and writer Hasan Cemal was honored 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.

Watch videos of the award ceremony in March 2015

Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Journalism

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

David Kidwell and Alex Richards

David Kidwell and Alex Richards

Winner:
The Chicago Tribune and reporters David Kidwell and Alex Richards for their series Red Light Cameras, a comprehensive series that exposed the corruption and mismanagement of a traffic-monitoring program that has raked in hundreds of millions of dollars from unsuspecting motorists in Chicago over the course of ten years.

Finalists:
Chicago Magazine for The Truth About Chicago’s Crime Rates by David Bernstein and Noah Isackson, a series of reports that revealed efforts by the Chicago Police Department to improve the city’s high crime-rate statistics by deliberately underreporting or misclassifying crimes

And The Longest Road, a three-part series by The Boston Globe’s Jenna Russell that follows the struggles of a young man with mental illness and his mother as they try to cope with the effects of his illness.

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

Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism

Established in 1967, the annual $20,000 Worth Bingham Prize honors investigative reporting of stories of national significance where the public interest is being ill-served.

Audra D.S. Burch and Carol Marbin Miller

Audra D.S. Burch and Carol Marbin Miller

Winner: The Miami Herald and reporters Carol Marbin Miller and Audra D.S. Burch for their meticulously researched and reported “Innocents Lost” series, which examines how more than 500 children died over a six year period, victims not only of abusive or neglectful caregivers but of a flawed Florida child welfare system.

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Watch the award presentation and the speech by reporters Carol Marbin Miller and Audra D.S. Burch

J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Awards

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)
From top: Jenny Nordberg, Harold Holzer and Dan Egan

From top: Jenny Nordberg, Harold Holzer and Dan Egan

Winner: Jenny Nordberg for “The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan”

Finalist: Joshua Davis for “Spare Parts: Four Undocumented Teenagers, One Ugly Robot, and the Battle for the American Dream”

The Mark Lynton History Prize ($10,000)

Winner: Harold Holzer for “Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion”

Finalist: Andrew Roberts for “Napoleon: A Life”

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

Winner: Dan Egan for “Liquid Desert: Life and Death of the Great Lakes”

Finalist: Heather Ann Thompson for “Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy”

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Joe Alex Morris Jr. Lecture

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.

Helene Cooper

Helene Cooper

The next Joe Alex Morris Jr. Memorial Lecture on international reporting is scheduled for spring 2016 with New York Times Pentagon correspondent Helene Cooper, who shared a 2015 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for her work covering the Ebola crisis in West Africa and has won numerous other awards for her work.

From 2008 to 2012, she covered the White House and prior to that was The Times’s diplomatic correspondent. She has reported from 64 countries, from Pakistan to the Congo. Previously, Cooper worked for 12 years at the Wall Street Journal, where she was a foreign correspondent, reporter and editor, working in the London, Washington and Atlanta bureaus. She is the author of “The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood,” a New York Times best seller and a National Books Critics Circle finalist in autobiography in 2009.

I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence

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 and courage that characterized I.F. Stone’s Weekly, published from 1953 to 1971.

Robert Parry

Robert Parry

Winner: Robert Parry, founder and editor of Consortiumnews.com, for his career distinguished by meticulously researched investigations, intrepid questioning and reporting that has challenged mainstream media. Parry is perhaps best known for his breaking news reporting during the Iran-Contra Affair in the 1980s.

The Nieman Foundation honored Parry in a ceremony on Oct. 22, 2015.

Learn more and watch videos of the award ceremony, including Parry’s acceptance speech

Listen to Robert Parry speak with Tom Ashbrook, NF ’96, on NPR’s On Point

Read the press release