We are excited to share that The Post has been recognized in three categories in the inaugural Poynter Journalism Prizes, which has continued a 45-year journalism awards tradition that was most recently administered by the News Leaders Association.
“The Collection,” a multi-part project by Nicole Dungca, Claire Healy and Andrew Ba Tran, has won The Dori J. Maynard Justice Award, which honors excellence in social justice reporting. The investigation exposed the Smithsonian’s collection of more than 250 brains, gathered by museum anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka for a “racial brain collection,” and the Smithsonian’s holdings of more than 30,700 other body parts. Over 40 years, Hrdlicka methodically harvested brains and body parts from indigenous people and communities of color to further his now-debunked theories about anatomical differences between races. The judges called the entry “exquisite, tenacious reporting and impact,” adding “this multimedia series was impossible to put down. It’s important, institute-changing storytelling that’s historical and current.”
Hannah Natanson’s series, “The School Book Wars,” was honored as one of three finalists for The First Amendment Award. In this series of stories, Hannah produced a revelatory, first-of-its-kind examination of who and what is driving the historic surge in school book challenges across America. The series yielded important new information, including finding that just 11 people were responsible for filing the majority of school book challenges in 2021-2022. She further discovered that school officials return almost half of challenged books to shelves, but that LGBTQ books are by far most likely to be banned. This large-scale data analysis was paired with deep, intimate dives into the lives upended around book challenges on all sides of the debate.
Monica Ulmanu, senior editor for visual storytelling in The Washington Post’s Climate & Environment department, was recognized as a finalist in The Punch Sulzberger Innovator of Year for helping transform how we create novel audience-first experiences that integrate graphics, data, video, photography, design and text. Monica helped lead our project last year on climate change’s impact on human health, “The Human Limit,” as well as “Unearthing the Future,” which was an immersive visual project on Earth’s climate history and what it says about modern day perils. Monica was also the lead editor, with the investigative department, in an examination of the threat of flooding to the nation’s capital. Beyond project work, Monica has created a first-of-its-kind vertical on The Post website, Climate Lab, which uses data visualization to shed light on climate and environmental issues. She also oversees our climate graphics columnist, Harry Stevens, whose columns have explored the mortality impact of climate change and as well as the migration of tree populations.
Read the full announcement of the Poynter Journalism Prizes here.
