Don’t go overboard for cross-border, caring, sharing data journalism as the only form of investigation in town. Not, at least, if the town is Prague, where they announced the winners of the increasingly influential (460 entries from 42 different countries) European Press Prize last week.
Sir Harold Evans, patron saint of investigative reporters, is chairman of the EPP jury. He and his colleagues could gone for the International Consortium’s terrific expose of HSBC banking in Switzerland, or for the Sunday Times’s earth-shaking work on drug-taking athletes. But no: this year, as last, the prizes went to brave men and women, digging alone.
Marion Quillard went to Bukavu in the Congo for Le Monde Diplomatique to find the supposed “rape capital of the world”, with headlines, NGOs and charity money pouring in: except that, on the ground, it seemed more the hype capital of the world. Justyna Kopińska followed a trail of appalling behaviour into the raddled heart of a psychiatric children’s home for Gazeta Wyborcza. Just as, in the previous year’s EPP, a brave Spaniard discovered – on the spot and in evident danger – how Colombian soldiers were making a mint by killing civilians and kitting their bodies out in guerrilla uniforms so they could claim government bounty payments, and a young Russian woman operating alone on the Ukraine border finally told the world how Putin’s forces were involved there.
I find these European – nothing to do with the EU – awards compelling because it’s not just data that crosses borders here, but a shining, often incredibly courageous search for a shared truth. Journalism speaks many tongues and appears in many different guises: but you know it and feel it when you find it.
