Grist and Washington Post win ONA’s 2024 UF Data Investigative Journalism Award
The Washington Post and Grist are the winners of the 2024 University of Florida Award in Data Investigative Journalism, presented by the Online News Association (ONA), in the Large Newsroom and Small/Medium Newsroom categories, respectively. The awards were presented on Sept. 20, 2024, at the ONA annual conference.
The Washington Post won for “Dying Early: America’s Life Expectancy Crisis,” a series that focused on why the increasing burden of chronic disease had made the U.S. especially vulnerable to the COVID-19 global pandemic.
Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization focused on climate solutions and uncovering environmental injustices, won for “Misplaced Trust,” which explores how stolen wealth from Indigenous lands continues to transform public institutions and provides insight into the relationship between colonialism, higher education, and climate change in the Western United States.
Each organization received a $7,500 prize.
The award, first established in 2014, honors high-impact data journalism that is exceptionally well presented. The award is funded through a gift to the University of Florida from the estate of the late Lorraine Dingman.
The University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications (UFCJC) also sponsored a data investigative journalism session at this year’s ONA conference. The session included moderator Harrison Hove, interim director of UFCJC’s Innovation News Center, and:
- Alan Halaly, UFCJC B.S. Journalism 2024, who was part of a student team in collaboration with the University of Missouri that won the 2024 ONA Student Journalism Award for “The Price of Plenty,” an investigation on fertilizer and its consequences from the ground up. Halaly is now a water reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
- Maria Parazo Rose, a spatial data analyst for Grist, who was part of the reporting team on “Misplaced Trust.”
- Lexi Churchill, a research reporter for the ProPublica-Texas Tribune Investigative Initiative, which won this year’s Collier Prize for State Government Accountability for a series on the tragic mishandling of the active-shooter situation at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022.
Posted: September 20, 2024
Category: College News
Tagged as: Awards, Collier Prize, Data Investigative Journalism, Online News Association
