Philip Meyer Journalism Award
The National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, a joint program of IRE and the Missouri School of Journalism; the Knight Chair in Journalism at Arizona State University; and IRE are proud to have the Philip Meyer Journalism Award, a contest to recognize the best journalism done using social science research methods.
The awards are in honor of Philip Meyer, Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Meyer is the author of Precision Journalism, the seminal 1972 book (and subsequent editions) that focused growing numbers of journalists on the idea of using social science methods to do better journalism. He pioneered in using survey research as a reporter for Knight Ridder newspapers to explore the causes of race riots in the 1960s.
Three awards will be given annually - a first, second and third place - to recognize the best work using techniques that are part of precision journalism, computer-assisted reporting and social science research. The awards are: $500 for first, $300 for second, and $200 for third.
The contest also helps identify the techniques and resources used to complete each story. Entries are placed in the IRE Resource Center, allowing members to learn from each other.
In an effort to avoid conflicts of interest, work that included any significant role by a member of the IRE Board of Directors or an IRE contest judge may not be entered in the contest. This often represents a significant sacrifice on the part of the individual — and sometimes an entire newsroom. The IRE membership appreciates this devotion to the values of the organization.
The Philip Meyer Journalism Award was established in 2005. Click to see past winners:
2007 2006 2005
2008 Philip Meyer Award winners
The awards will be presented at the 2009 CAR Conference in Indianapolis.
The contest, for work published or broadcast between October 2007 and October 2008, attracted entries from across the country. Stories are available to IRE members through the IRE Resource Center. Click on a story link below or contact us at 573-882-3364 or .
First Place
Scripps Howard News Service, "Saving Babies: Exposing Sudden Infant Death". Scripps Howard national reporters Tom Hargrove, Lee Bowman and Lisa Hoffman did a masterful job in exposing bureaucratic lapses that hinder the search for causes of Sudden Infant Death. Making good use of strong statistical tools, the team analyzed the sharp differences in cause-of-death diagnoses among the states and produced the first rigorous proof of the value of the local and state child death review boards that only some jurisdictions use. A few months after the project ran, then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama introduced national legislation that would require medical examiners to make death scene investigations in all cases of unexpected infant death.
Second Place
Kansas City Star, "Fatal Failures". Reporters Mike Casey and Rick Montgomery analyzed 1.9 million records from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to uncover NHTSA's failure to consider non-deploying airbags as being a significant safety issue. The work by Casey and Montgomery suggested that nearly 300 people are killed each year in accidents when airbags didn't inflate when they should have. Initially, NHTSA strongly disputed the findings, but finally did its own analysis and came to the same conclusions. This project combined the best of the kind of techniques Phil Meyer has championed and the investigative mindset that refuses to take "no" for an answer when the stakes (in this case, life and death) are high.
Third Place
Philadelphia Inquirer, "Too Tough: Tactics in Suburban Policing", Mark Fazlollah, Dylan Purcell, Melissa Dribben and Keith Herbert. The Inquirer's team studied arrest and court data from police departments in the suburbs that surround Philadelphia and found towns where blacks were being arrested in extraordinary numbers for minor offenses like loitering or jaywalking. Their followup reporting uncovered jails where thousands of illegal strip searches were being done, police dogs being used to control black children walking home from school, and traffic citations that were filled out in advance of arrests.
IRE Awards
Precision Journalism 101
Listen to retired Chapel Hill Knight Professor Philip Meyer and Arizona State University Knight Professor Steve Doig discuss the past and future of Precision Journalism. Listen to the audio file (.MP3), edited from "Precision Journalism: Where we’ve come from and where we’re going," a panel at the 2008 IRE Conference in Miami.
