The New York Times won the 2020 Philip Meyer Journalism Award from Investigative Reporters and Editors for efforts tracking the pandemic in the United States. The award honors the year’s best work using social research and data journalism methods.
The first-place award also honors the Times’s project to track U.S. virus cases since the beginning of the pandemic and also includes articles that used data to understand how the virus was spreading.
The judges commented:
“The Times took on vetting and building out a strict methodology to ensure that data on Covid cases at the county level, at nursing homes, at universities and in prisons could be used reliably. But The Times also published groundbreaking journalism rooted in social science methods that helped shed light on disparities in the impact from Covid-19. This work truly is a public service for researchers, for public policy efforts, and most importantly, for readers.”
The Times was among the first organizations to provide real-time data on U.S. cases at the county level.
