Collaboration, Innovation Define Pulitzer Center OJA Winners

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Three Pulitzer Center-supported projects are winners of the 2024 Online Journalism Awards (OJA), given by the Online News Association (ONA). The Online Journalism Awards honor excellence in digital journalism.

The winner of the Al Neuharth Innovation in Investigative Journalism Award is Amazon Underworld, a cross-border collaboration led by 2022 Rainforest Investigations Network (RIN) Fellow Bram Ebus. The project was produced through a collaboration between regional outlets InfoAmazonia (Brazil), La Liga Contra el Silencio (Colombia), and Armando.info (Venezuela), as well as other RIN Fellows, to assess the “criminal ecosystem” of the Amazon rainforest.

The team carried out a comprehensive investigation of organized crime groups operating in the countries that form the Amazon basin. The project’s interactive presentation, which caught the attention of the OJA judges, gave a breakdown of the crime groups’ economic, environmental, and social impacts in the region. Through on-the-ground reporting, the project also showed readers what life is like in these regions that include parts of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil. 

“The recognition of Amazon Underworld confirms that some of the most impactful investigations need to be done in collaboration. Only by mobilizing an international team of journalists, our RIN Fellow Bram Ebus was able to reveal the scale of the organized crime problem existing in the Amazon. This project is not only receiving important awards, such as OJA or the Gabo, it is also influencing the public agenda of institutions working for a better future of the region,” said Gustavo Faleiros, director of the Pulitzer Center’s Environmental Investigations Unit. 

Ebus has led workshops and webinars to share more about how his team achieved the large-scale collaboration: 37 journalists from 12 countries spent over a year on the project, building a database of municipality-level crime data on armed groups. The project also won a Gabo Prize earlier this summer, the most prestigious journalism award in the region, as well as a Cláudio Weber Abramo Award for data journalism. Most recently, the project released Dragas (Dredges), a documentary about the investigation. 

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The spirit of collaboration also paid off for two more winning Pulitzer Center projects based in the United States. 

The Online Journalism Award for Student Journalism recognized a partnership between the University of Florida and the Missouri School of Journalism. The collaboration brought 18 student journalists together for a one-semester field course looking into the fertilizer industry. The resulting five-part series, The Price of Plenty, featured 18 stories tackling issues like phosphate mining in Florida, climate vulnerabilities of the fertilizer industry, where farmers stand on the issues, and how the industry is influencing research agendas at universities. The project was supported by Connected Coastlines, the Pulitzer Center’s U.S. climate initiative. 

Led by professors Cynthia Barnett in Florida and Sara Shipley Hiles in Missouri, students used corporate, historial, and environmental data to illustrate the impact of the industry. They then hit the ground to explore solutions and talk with those impacted. 

“We saw right away that Cynthia Barnett and Sara Shipley had such a clever approach to their collaborative reporting project. Not only would it be an in-depth reporting project into the fertilizer industry involving multiple news outlets, they also believed that their students, many of whom had to leave college during their freshman year because of the pandemic, deserved a valuable field experience involving boots-on-the-ground reporting. We’re so pleased to have supported this work,” said Pulitzer Center Senior Editor Steve Sapienza.

Since publication, the project has inspired younger students to write letters to their local representatives through the Pulitzer Center’s Local Letters for Global Change contest. 

“At this critical point for our land, water, and climate, we need to step up. As we move forward addressing Ohio’s emissions, we cannot ignore our huge farming industry,” wrote one ninth-grader from Ohio to U.S. Rep. Shontel M. Brown. 
 

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Another Center-supported project to win a 2024 Online Journalism Award is Misplaced Trust, published by Grist. The project explored how land expropriated from Indigenous Americans through the Morrill Act of 1862 is, to this day, used as a source of funds for 14 public universities in the United States. 

Journalist-grantees Tristan Ahtone and Bobby Lee led a team to analyze and visualize public data on public land-grant university holdings. The project was a continuation of the bombshell Land-Grab Universities series, which showed how schools were still profiting from endowments on stolen Indigenous land. Misplaced Trust went further by mapping out the possessions and directly linking university endowments to environmental destruction through fossil fuel extraction, logging, and mining. 

The team at Grist, beyond its main findings, published its database and methodology. The project also inspired other newsrooms to take on the story, and grantees have held training sessions on how to use the data for other journalists. 

“We’re very pleased that our support helped enable the diligent work of the Grist team. Unearthing the data about stolen and exploited land and sharing the public datasets makes this an issue impossible for universities, staff, students, and local communities to ignore. This is public service journalism at its finest,” said Sapienza. 

Since publication, the story has had political—and personal—impact: 

The U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources reached out to Grist wanting to learn more. Reporters met with the communications director for ranking member Rep. Raúl Grijalva, who expressed interest in scheduling a hearing based on their work. There were multiple references to the story in local Wyoming media as the state debated student vouchers for Native students. In Arizona, Tucson City Council Member Steve Kozachik shared the story in a newsletter, and the commissioner of public lands for New Mexico, Stephanie Garcia Richard, referenced it in an interview. 

In April, the University of Arizona forgave student debt for Alina Sierra, a former University of Arizona student and lead subject in the story. Her remaining debt, in the form of a FAFSA loan, was paid in full by a private donor.