The Guardian’s Middle East correspondent, Martin Chulov, has been named journalist of the year by the Foreign Press Association (FPA), on a night that saw the paper take five more prizes for long-form journalism.
Chulov, who won the Orwell prize for journalism earlier this year, has reported from the Middle East since 2005, recently anchoring much of the Guardian’s coverage of Islamic State and the war in Syria, for which he was also recognised by the FPA.
The Guardian also won in five out of the six categories it was nominated for, including:
- Feature story of the year: Martin Chulov proved his worth with his investigation, Isis: the inside story, revealing exclusive details of the terror group’s origins inside an Iraqi prison.
- Financial story of the year: Sam Knight’s feature, Can Winston Churchill’s grandson save Serco? And is it worth saving?, found the outsourcing firm struggling for survival after scandal and mismanagement.
- Science story of the year: Why can’t the world’s greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness? Oliver Burkeman found academia’s answers to the problem had barely advanced beyond Descartes.
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Sports story of the year: David Goldblatt went to the prison where murderers play for Manchester United, and found a Ugandan jail with what is surely the world’s most elaborate prison football league.
- Travel/Tourism story of the year: Christopher de Bellaigue endured the trials of a tour guide in Iran as he joined a group of tourists testing the limit of the country’s new openness as it stood on the brink of a new nuclear deal.
The prize for print news story of the year went to the Sunday Times; TV news story of the year to Channel 4 News; TV feature of the yearwas won by ITN; BBC Radio 4 won radio story of the year; the Financial Times had environment story of the year; arts and culture story of the year went to the Sunday Times magazine; while story of the year by a full member of the FPA was won by Japan’s Sankei Shimbun newspaper.
Caroline Ariba of Uganda’s Sunday Vision was named as the Thomson Foundation young journalist from the developing world.
Jonathan Shainin, the Guardian’s long read editor, said: “The section was launched last September, so it feels like a fantastic validation to be recognised for the work we’ve published in our first year – and to see awards go to these terrific writers, all of whom put in enormous amounts of work on their stories. Particularly Martin, who really has had an astonishing year.”
The success of the long reads, all of which are about 5,000 words, showed that even in an age of online, quick-fix journalism, there was still an appetite for deep and immersive reporting and storytelling, Shainin said.
“We give writers a very long time to report – sometimes months – and we also take quite a while over the editing, so that the finished product that appears in the paper has gone through many rounds of revisions,” he added.
“I do hope it leads other news organisations to follow the Guardian and devote real resources and space to this kind of long-form journalism.”
