Reuters recently celebrated the best of its journalism from around the world at its 2024 Journalists of the Year Awards.
The ceremony was streamed globally to colleagues across Thomson Reuters, and celebrated teams and individuals across fourteen categories. The program features interviews and reflections from Reuters journalists on their award-winning coverage.
The Reporter of the Year category recognized Laila Bassam for her exclusive and competitive reporting during the Lebanon war and then the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria and Luc Cohen for dominating coverage of the highest profile federal court cases at speed and at depth, winning most key alerts in the incredibly competitive Trump hush-money case and producing lucid legal analysis and explanatory journalism along the way.
Hannah McKay was named Photojournalist of the Year for assignments that took her to France for the D-Day anniversary and the Olympics, the U.S. for the elections, Israel for the ongoing conflict, and to Azerbaijan for the Grand Prix, producing stand-out work at home and abroad.
The Video Journalist of the Year award went to Joseph Campbell for his breadth of coverage in 2024 from the rooftops of Beirut to the streets of South Korea in the aftermath of the botched martial law attempt, always delivering well-shot, carefully framed and sensitive coverage of his subjects.
There were two winners for Production & Publishing Editor of the Year: Maye-E Wong, for continuing to push visual storytelling to a new level on Reuters digital platforms such as the Wider Image and Special Reports microsites, while mentoring and motivating photographers to pitch long-form visual stories across the globe, raising their photography to new levels; and Stephen Farrell and the live page editors, for launching the successful Live Page in 2024, working with product, digital and reporting teams globally to provide a new, real-time platform for Reuters content.
The award for Beat Reporting of the Year went to coverage of the collapse of Intel, by Max A. Cherney, Jeffrey Dastin, Milana Vinn, Anirban Sen, Dawn Chmielewski, Stephen Nellis, Mike Spector and Fanny Potkin. The coverage documented the collapse of American icon Intel, including an in-depth scoop on how the chipmaker passed on buying nearly half of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and an investigation into the highly regarded CEO’s personal role in the demise.
Breaking News of the Year was awarded to the Reuters team in South Korea for their exceptional breaking news coverage of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol's martial law declaration and the fallout.
In the Commentary of the Year category, Breakingviews’ Jonathan Guilford won for a series of columns illuminating the murky corners of the market for private assets ranging from infrastructure to private credit, drawing on extensive reporting and deep insight to explain the growth of these markets and highlight the risks they pose.
The series ‘Fentanyl Express’ was named the winner of Enterprise Reporting of the Year, for the multipart, multimedia series exposing the global supply chain for the chemicals used to make illicit fentanyl. The team included Maurice Tamman, Laura Gottesdiener, Stephen Eisenhammer, Drazen Jorgic, Daisy Chung, Kristina Cooke, Michael Martina, Antoni Slodkowski and Shannon Stapleton.
There were two winners for Graphic/Visualization of the Year. U.S. election graphics, by Dea Bankova, Minami Funakoshi, Ally Levine, Clare Farley, Julia Wolfe and Jon McClure won for the 4,000 embeds across eight languages that showed real-time U.S. election results for every contest across president, senate and house, with in-depth maps, tables and graphics. Ben Welsh won for real-time data trackers, including tracking the outsize importance of the Magnificent Seven tech stocks and tracking the Fed's rate decisions, bringing together real-time data feeds with smart insight and context to help explain both daily news headlines and longer-term trends.
Innovation of the Year went to the AI editing tools in Reuters publishing platform LEON. The new AI editing tools include the development of the Error Catcher tool—which can improve accuracy by at least 10 percent—by Lisa Shumaker in collaboration with the Tech and Product teams.
In the Scoop of the Year category, Hyunjoo Jin and Norihiko Shirouzu were named a co-winner, for an exclusive reporting that Elon Musk and Tesla had cancelled its entry-level car program and were shifting efforts to its robotaxi program, which Musk denied but then later confirmed at a company event.
Drazen Jorgic for a scoop on the arrest of son of El Chapo was also a co-winner in the category, for breaking the news of the arrest on U.S. soil of the son of ex-Sinaloa Cartel chief Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman after he kidnapped his father's old business partner and flew him to the U.S. to aid in his own efforts to cut a sweetheart deal with U.S. authorities.
U.S. election monitoring and snapping, led by Caitlin Webber, Rami Ayyub, Tim Ahmann, Jason Lange, was awarded Speed Win of the Year. The team’s meticulous planning and execution led to a dominant timings performance on U.S. election results, with timings wins on the first two calls that Trump had won, the first call on Republicans winning control of the Senate and the first call on Republicans winning control of the House.
Photo of the Year, which is voted on by Thomson Reuters staff, was awarded to Mohammed Salem for his photo of Palestinians waiting to receive food during the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan, as the conflict between Israel and Hamas continued, in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip.
Finally, Story of the Year was awarded to two teams. Staff covering China’s economics and regulatory landscape won for being consistently ahead on China’s big economic targets and major policy turns with a combination of market-moving scoops, deeply reported enterprise stories and big timing wins on key economic data.
And ‘The Starving World’ series won for special reports, graphics and scoops on how the world’s system for detecting and alleviating famine is struggling to cope as conflicts wrack developing nations from Sudan to Gaza to Afghanistan, exposing the causes of the international hunger-relief crisis and exploring solutions.
For more of Reuters award-winning journalism, visit Reuters.com.
Media Contact:
Heather Carpenter
Heather.Carpenter @ tr.com
