Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism announced Wednesday that Inside Climate News has won the 2016 John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism for its revelatory investigative series “Exxon: The Road Not Taken.”
Reporters Neela Banerjee, John H. Cushman Jr., David Hasemyer and Lisa Song will be honored for the breakthrough investigation that exposed Exxon’s decades-long internal research into climate change and its connection to fossil fuel emissions.
Finalists for the prize are: The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, The Huffington Post, the Investigative Fund, the Food & Environment Reporting Network and other media partners for “Evicted and Abandoned: The World Bank’s Broken Promise to the Poor” and Climate Central for “Pulp Fiction.”
The awards will be presented by Dean Steve Coll on Sept. 28 at the Columbia Journalism School in New York.
The John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism, which carries a $5,000 prize, is given annually for news reporting that makes an exceptional contribution to the public’s understanding of environmental issues.
The award was founded in 1993 by family, friends and colleagues of Oakes (1913-2001), who was an environmental journalism pioneer and an editorial writer for The New York Times.
