Categories: OLD Media Moves

ICIJ wins Polk Award in financial reporting

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists won the George Polk Award in financial reporting for mining a trove of 13.4 million records to reveal how corporate giants and prominent wealthy individuals use financial manipulations to evade taxes.

The winners were announced Tuesday by Long Island University in a ceremony held at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

The George Polk Awards are conferred annually to honor special achievement in journalism. The awards place a premium on investigative and enterprising reporting that gains attention and achieves results. They were established in 1949 by Long Island University to commemorate George Polk, a CBS correspondent murdered in 1948 while covering the Greek civil war.

ICIJ also won the award last year for “The Panama Papers.”

The consortium worked with Süddeutsche Zeitung, McClatchy, the Miami Herald, Fusion and more than more than 400 journalists from over 100 other media partners in nearly 80 countries to investigate a trove of leaked documents from inside Mossack Fonseca and Co., a law firm specializing in offshore secrecy.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.