ProPublica, ICIJ win Forbes Award for business reporting

ProPublica and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists combined forces to win the Malcolm Forbes Award for business reporting from the Overseas Press Club with a global investigation on corrupt and dangerous honorary diplomats.

The reporters were Debbie Cenziper, Will Fitzgibbon, Eva Herscowitz and Delphine Reuter.

The judges noted the project’s ambition and scope, noting the sheer force of reporting necessary to connect court records, news reports, public policy documents and government reports from points around the globe. They also cited the impact and change the project drove, including moves from Paraguay, Finland, and Brazil to investigate the consuls and the systems that had long protected their power.

Bloomberg reporters Max De Haldevang, Akshat Rathi, Natasha White, Demetrios Pogkas, Verity Ratcliffe, Ben Elgin and Sinduja Rangarajan won the Whitman Bassow Award for international environmental reporting.

The winning entry by Bloomberg Green took on the complex topic of carbon offsets, the system that allows companies to continue emitting their own greenhouse gases while paying others to reduce their emissions. The reporters analyzed more than 200,000 transactions to show how dozens of companies are using questionable accounting to claim “carbon neutral” status, allowing them to erase tens of millions of tons of carbon from their books.

See all of the winners here.