Bloomberg News and The Wall Street Journal are among the winners of the 2024 Investigative Reporters and Editors Awards.
FOI Award
Winner — IRE Medal: “Visa Games” — Bloomberg News
by Eric Fan, Zachary Mider, Denise Lu, Marie Patino, Nic Querolo, Coulter Jones and Kyle Kim
Judges’ comments: Bloomberg successfully sued the Department of Homeland Security to force its release of 1.8 million records on the controversial H-1B visa program. Those records helped fuel its investigative stories revealing how staffing companies gamed the system by filing multiple visa lottery entries for the same workers, resulting in bad outcomes for other immigrants and for American workers. In addition, Bloomberg has made the data publicly available to academics and other journalists to report on the United States’ antiquated visa program.
Print/Online – Division I
Winner: “The Great Medicare Scandal” — The Wall Street Journal
by Christopher Weaver, Tom McGinty, Anna Wilde Mathews, Mark Maremont and Andrew Mollica
Judges’ comments: Groundbreaking new data, well documented. Not the most exciting topic, but they made it compelling. A clear winner.
The annual contest showcases exemplary work by members of Investigative Reporters and Editors from the past year. Awards will be presented at the 2025 IRE Conference in New Orleans on Saturday, June 21.
Since 1979, the IRE Awards have recognized outstanding watchdog journalism. The IRE Contest Committee selected this year’s winners from more than 540 entries across 19 categories.
See all of the winners here.
