The Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism recognizes the work of courageous journalists and journalism organizations around the world. Nieman Fellows in the class of 1964 established the award to honor the Nieman curator who retired that year and winners are chosen by fellows during their Nieman year at Harvard.

2020 Winner

The Nieman class of 2020 selected Puerto Rico’s Centro de Periodismo Investigativo (CPI, the Center for Investigative Reporting) for the Lyons Award for its relentless drive in investigating the most pressing issues on the island, including the government’s mismanagement of public funds; the incorrect death count after Hurricane Maria; the ongoing financial debt crisis; and the secret communications among the island’s top political leadership—which when revealed by CPI, sparked protests and ultimately led to Governor Ricardo Rosselló’s resignation from office.

The fellows noted that CPI demonstrated the highest degree of conscience and integrity in its work through uncovering political corruption and financial mismanagement. By pressing for government transparency and filling in the gaps of truth with hard-nosed reporting, CPI has held the Puerto Rican government to account and demonstrated the power of fact finding.

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• Watch the award ceremony videos

The Nieman class of 2021 has begun nominating candidates for the 2021 Lyons Award.

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

2019 Winner

The Wall Street Journal and PBS’s “Frontline” for their joint investigation “Forsaken by the Indian Health Service.” The reporting team exposed decades of abuse, negligence and dysfunction inside the Indian Health Service (IHS), the federal agency that provides health care to more than two million Native Americans. In articles and in the accompanying documentary “Predator on the Reservation,” the reporters revealed that the IHS failed to stop child predators and other dangerous doctors practicing in hospitals that serve some of the nation’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens. The reporting quickly led to a number of important outcomes.

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The Nieman community was saddened to learn in October 2020 of the passing of Joan Bingham, a leader in the publishing world and Worth Bingham’s wife, who passionately supported the Bingham Prize from its inception in 1967. We are grateful to Joan and her daughter Clara Bingham for their sustained commitment to celebrating the work of investigative reporters throughout the United States.

The Taylor Award for Fairness in Journalism honors 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.

2019 Winner

Reporter Pamela Colloff for “He’s a Liar, a Con Artist and a Snitch. His Testimony Could Soon Send a Man to His Death,” an investigation of the dangers of relying on jailhouse informants. Colloff, a senior reporter at ProPublica and staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, revealed that longtime con man Paul Skalnik is likely one of the most prolific jailhouse informants in U.S. history. He has testified or provided information in at least 37 cases in Pinellas County, Florida alone and helped to send four men to death row, including inmate James Dailey. In examining Dailey’s case, Colloff raised serious questions both about Skalnik’s testimony and Dailey’s guilt, exposing the much broader systemic problems related to using untrustworthy jailhouse informants in court. Her reporting has led to significant reforms.

Two other entries were selected as finalists for the Taylor Award:

• Finalist :“Ashley’s Story,” an Indianapolis Star series by Marisa Kwiatkowski that details the life of Ashley Peterson, a young woman whose life challenges reflect the devastating long-term impact of childhood trauma.
• Finalist: “The TurboTax Trap” by ProPublica reporters Justin Elliott and Paul Kiel, a series that uncovered years of deceptive practices by Intuit, the maker of TurboTax software.

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Established in 2008, the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence 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.

2020 Winner

Maria Hinojosa, founder of The Futuro Media Group. During her 30-year career, Hinojosa’s groundbreaking documentaries and investigative reports have brought to light stories about the lives, challenges and contributions of millions of Americans living in communities too often ignored by traditional media.

Announcing the award, Florence Graves, chair of the I.F. Stone Medal selection committee said: “As Hinojosa worked on her vision to make diverse Americans more visible in news reporting, she had a stunning insight: The country’s rapidly growing multicultural population was becoming the new American mainstream. And although they didn’t ask for anyone’s permission or issue any press releases, Hinojosa could see that they were influencing every aspect of contemporary life and changing America—just as waves of immigrants before them, including Hinojosa and her family, had done.”

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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 2020 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize ($10,000)

• Winner: Alex Kotlowitz, the author of the national bestseller “There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America” and a writer in residence at Northwestern University, has won for “An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago” (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday), which upends what we think we know about gun violence and the individuals who have emerged from it though a spellbinding collection of intimate profiles chronicling one summer in Chicago.
• Finalist: Emily Bazelon, a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, and a lecturer at Yale Law School, has been named a finalist for “Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration” (Random House), which closely tracks two cases of people caught up in the criminal justice system and illustrates how that system can begin working toward a different and profoundly better future.

The 2020 J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Awards (two $25,000 prizes)

• Winner: Bartow J. Elmore, an associate professor of environmental history and core faculty member of Ohio State University’s Sustainability Institute, has won for “Seed Money: Monsanto’s Past and the Future of Food” (W. W. Norton), which addresses the pressing question of how to feed a growing population in the years ahead and exposes how a company that once made Agent Orange and PCBs survived its complicated chemical past to seed our food future.
• Winner: Shahan Mufti, a journalist and professor of journalism at the University of Richmond in Virginia, has won for “American Caliph: The True Story of the Hanafi Siege, America’s First Homegrown Islamic Terror Attack” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which details the formation and development of competing Muslim communities in America and explores issues of race, immigration, foreign policy, Islam, and terrorism in 20th century America.

The 2020 Mark Lynton History Prize (two $10,000 winners in 2019)

• Winner: Kerri K. Greenidge, a lecturer in Tufts University’s Consortium of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora, where she is the director of the program in American Studies and co-director of the African American Trail Project, has won for “Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter” (Liveright), a long-overdue biography of American civil rights hero William Monroe Trotter, whose life offers a link between the vision of Frederick Douglass and black radicalism in the modern era.
• Finalist: Daniel Immerwahr, an associate professor of history at Northwestern University and the author of Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development,” has been named a finalist for “How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which presents a history of the United States’ reach offshore, from Puerto Rico to the Philippines and beyond.
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• Watch a conversation with the winners

The Joe Alex Morris Jr. Lecture is presented annually by an American overseas correspondent or commentator on foreign affairs who is invited to Harvard to discuss international reporting. Plans are underway to schedule the next Morris lecture in 2021.