A Nigerian editor and a Mexican freelance journalist whose investigative reviews exposed companies that endangered public overall health have won the 2014 Knight Worldwide Journalism Award.
Oluwatoyosi Ogunseye, editor of Nigeria’s Sunday Punch newspaper, uncovered that a manufacturing plant’s fumes were generating local residents seriously unwell.
Alejandra Xanic von Bertrab, a freelance reporter in Mexico, showed how businesses that flagrantly violated the law had been leading to deaths and injuries.
“These journalists went the additional mile to expose health dangers,” mentioned Joyce Barnathan, president of the International Centre for Journalists (ICFJ). “Their coverage forced governments to get robust action to defend the public nicely-getting.”
Ogunseye is the youngest and 1st female editor in the 40-year history of Sunday Punch, a broadly study newspaper primarily based in Lagos.
She published a three-part series which unveiled that residents in a Lagos community had higher amounts of harmful toxins in their blood induced by pollutants from a nearby steel plant.
The coverage prompted the government to shut down the plant, and to enable it to reopen only underneath stringent new regulations.
In Mexico, an investigation by von Bertrab revealed that fumes from gas leaking into Guadalajara sewers posed an imminent danger. Shortly after her story ran, the gases exploded, killing at least 200 men and women, destroying 26 city blocks, and leaving as a lot of twenty,000 homeless.
Source: ICFJ here and here
Investigative journalism awards for Nigerian editor and Mexican reporter
