Guardian Australia journalists have been nominated for five Walkleys, the nation’s top journalism awards, a record number for the website.
Paul Farrell, Nick Evershed, Helen Davidson, Ri Liu and Josh Wall were nominated for multimedia storytelling for the the Nauru files, the investigation into a cache of more than 2,000 leaked reports that revealed the scale of abuse of children in Australian offshore detention.
The Nauru files were also recognised in the Walkleys’ international journalism category, where Farrell, Davidson, Evershed, Ben Doherty and the deputy editor, Will Woodward, were nominated for their coverage, which included revealing the despair of asylum seeker children stuck on Nauru.
Australia’s immigration laws were also the subject of Doherty’s feature “How the Australian immigration detention regime crushed Fazel Chegeni”, which brought Doherty a nomination in the short feature writing category.
David Marr and Melissa Davey’s coverage of Cardinal George Pell’s appearance before the royal commission was nominated for coverage of a major news event or issue. Marr and Davey’s entry included news, features, live blogs and a podcast.
Guardian Australia’s economics writer, Greg Jericho, has been nominated for his regular columns in the commentary, analysis, opinion and critique category.
A very personal column about his daughter, “I no longer see my daughter’s Down syndrome, I only see a beautiful girl called Emma”, is one of three pieces singled out by the judges.
Evershed has also been awarded a Walkleys grant for innovation in journalism to develop a system for automating news stories from data feeds.
Guardian Australia has won Walkleys every year since the site was launched. In 2013 it won the multimedia award for Firestorm, the story of the bushfires in Tasmania. In 2014 Guardian Australia and the ABC jointly won scoop of the year for the story of how Australia’s spy agencies targeted the Indonesian president’s mobile phone and writer Paul Daley won a Walkley for coverage of Indigenous affairs
In 2015 Stan Grant won the award for Indigenous coverage. Grant has been nominated for the book award this year for Talking to My Country.
The 2016 winners will be revealed at a gala dinner on Friday 2 December at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre.
