Dogbevi, Horwitz win Welles Prize

The Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism at Columbia Journalism School announced Wednesday that reporters from Ghana Business News and The Wall Street Journal have won the 2022 Christopher J. Welles Memorial Prize.

The prizes will be presented tonight at the Knight-Bagehot 47th Anniversary Gala Dinner at the Marriott Marquis in New York City.

Two reporters, both from the Knight-Bagehot Class of 2013, were singled out for this year’s Welles Prize: Emmanuel K. Dogbevi, the managing editor of Ghana Business News, and Jeff Horwitz, a reporter at The Wall Street Journal.

Dogbevi, who launched Ghana Business News in 2008, was cited for his series of stories on financial corruption in Ghana and exploitation of the country’s natural resources.

“Those stories are complicated, deep and difficult to pull off,” said one judge. “Going through a cache of financial documents and making sense of them is really tough. And Emmanuel is doing it under difficult circumstances, on a shoestring.”

Another judge praised Dogbevi’s “passion, resourcefulness and commitment” and noted that “several of our contestants can rely on well-funded organizations and all that comes with being part of a powerful media entity, like access, protection and publicity. This work stands alone for achieving impact under much tougher circumstances.”

Horwitz was awarded the Welles for his reporting on “The Facebook Files,” a series that dove into internal documents to reveal the company’s own research and awareness of the harms and dangers of its platform.

The series “exposed the harm done by the company on a global scale,” said one judge. “Jeff found a whistleblower who helped provide the backbone of his explosive reporting and then drew world-wide attention when Congress held hearings based on her statements and Jeff’s reporting.”

The Welles Prize honors the memory of Christopher J. Welles, a former director of the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship who was considered a top business writer from the 1960s to the 1980s for his penetrating accounts of malfeasance, corruption and corporate collapses. It is given annually to a graduate of the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship.