The Reporting Award
The award supports a work of journalism in any medium on significant underreported subjects in the public interest. The Reporting Award's first recipient, Sarah Stillman, returned to Iraq -- and made her first trip to Afghanistan -- to pursue an investigative reporting project on the wars' third-country nationals. The second recipient, Jina Moore, is investigating so-called "vulture funds," distressed debt investors who purchase delinquent debt of sovereign nations, many of them poor.
Sarah Stillman's piece, "The Invisible Army," appeared in the June 6, 2011 issue of The New Yorker. Sarah was a visiting scholar and inaugural recipient in 2010 of the Journalism Institute's Reporting Award. Using funds from the Award, which funds articles on under-reported subjects in the public interest, she reported in Iraq and Afghanistan on the plight of foreign workers on U.S. military bases there.
In establishing the award, the Carter Journalism Institute’s faculty cited the need for encouraging enterprise journalism during a time of extensive layoffs and budget cuts throughout the journalism industry. The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has estimated that the newspaper industry has lost $1.6 billion in annual reporting and editing capacity since 2000—a reduction of roughly 30 percent.
"The severe reduction in resources has a negative impact on all kinds of reporting, but especially investigative because of the high cost of doing it well," said Stephen D. Solomon, associate director of the Institute. "Support provided by the Reporting Award and other nontraditional sources can help fill in some of the gaps."
The award includes a stipend of $2,500 upon selection as the competition winner and an additional $10,000 upon timely completion and submission of the work, provided the Institute’s awards committee judges the work acceptable. The winner also has use of the Institute’s facilities, including an office, as well as NYU’s libraries and other scholarly resources. In addition, the program funds up to $6,000 in NYU journalism graduate student assistance. The Institute will publish the completed work either alone or in partnership with another media outlet.
View the Reporting Award's recipients.