One thing links two of the most brilliant newspaper reporters in the world (as garlanded last week by the European Press Prize). Elena Kostyuchenko from Novaya Gazeta in Moscow was trying to track a lorry full of corpses over the border from Ukraine into Russia when she met Lyana Elchaninova in a shopping centre. Lyana was looking for her soldier husband, missing reported dead. But now, with Elena by her side, she wades through an ocean of bureaucracy to find his body – and so confirm, definitively, that Russian troops are embroiled in the Ukraine war. No propaganda, just vivid, haunting journalism. When Putin claimed Russia wasn’t involved, that wasn’t true.
Meanwhile, Spanish reporter Ander Izagirre was working on a story in Colombia when the mother of Leonardo Porras Bernal asked for his help. Leonardo was dead, a supposed terrorist killed by the army. But how could that be? He was severely disabled. So Izagirre dropped one assignment and picked up another: to prove, in the end, how soldiers were killing innocent young men, dressing them in terrorist kit and claiming the bounty on their heads: a sickening scam.
And the thing that links the winners? Simply that they were in the field, meeting people, talking – not stuck in front of a screen and behind a desk. Simply that so many of the best (and worst) stories on Earth are out there – in shopping centres, at street corners – if you have the time and driving compulsion to look.
