Harvard Nominates 6 Teams for Investigative Reporting Prize; Final Announcement to Come in March

Harvard announced the finalists for its annual Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting yesterday, honoring six teams of newspaper journalists who uncovered scandals in finance, medicine, and elsewhere.

The winners of the award, given by the Kennedy School of Government’s Shorenstein Center for the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, will be announced March 13. The winning team will walk away with $25,000.

“The Goldsmith Prize is the Golden Globes to the Pulitzer’s Oscars,” said the center’s director, Alex S. Jones.

Four of last year’s six Goldsmith finalists went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. Nicholas D. Kristof ’82 won both a special citation from the Shorenstein Center and a Pulitzer last year.

The six teams of reporters nominated for this year’s finals wrote for The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Seattle Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The Miami Herald. Their investigations ranged from an expose of “the tactics of unscrupulous debt collection firms” in Massachusetts to “unethical manipulation” of stock options by Wall Street executives, according to a statement from the center.

Three of the stories that made last year’s final round covered high-profile national issues such as the National Security Agency’s wiretaps, the revelation of secret CIA prisons and the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal.

“This year you don’t have the blockbuster national security stories,” Jones said, “but that doesn’t mean that this year’s stories are any less important.”

The Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism and Book Prizes will also be given at the ceremony, according to the statement.

In addition, the Center for Public Integrity, which fosters public-minded investigative journalism, will be awarded a special citation for “its superb investigative work in the public interest.”

—Staff writer Khalid Abdalla can be reached at kabdalla@fas.harvard.edu.