ICIJ projects win awards for innovation, collaboration

ICIJ’s Luxembourg Leaks, Swiss Leaks and Fatal Extraction investigations have been honored with two 2015 EPPY awards for online storytelling and teamwork, announced by Editor & Publisher on Wednesday.

The award for Best Collaborative Investigative/Enterprise Reporting with under 1 million unique monthly visitors was given jointly to ICIJ’s Swiss Leaks and Luxembourg Leaks investigations, which collectively brought together more then 200 journalists from more than 60 countries to reveal widespread aggressive tax avoidance and questionable conduct through offshore finances.

In Luxembourg Leaks, ICIJ used secret documents to expose the backroom deals that allowed more than 370 companies – including Disney and Ikea – to avoid billions of euros in taxes on profits they channeled through Luxembourg. The Swiss Leaks project was based on 60,000 leaked files that revealed how the Swiss branch of HSBC, one of the world’s largest banks, profited from doing business with criminals and tax dodgers around the world.

Click to explore the immersive Fatal Extraction multimedia feature

Another ICIJ investigation, Fatal Extraction, won the Best Innovation Project with under 1 million unique monthly visitors. The project exposed links between Australian mining companies, their practices in Africa and allegations of negligence, violence, environmental law-breaking and other behaviors that experts said would never be tolerated in other jurisdictions. Working with the African Network of Centers for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR), ICIJ brought together more than a dozen reporters from across Africa for one of the largest-ever journalistic collaborations on the continent, and included an immersive multimedia feature produced in collaboration with ICIJ’s parent organization, the Center for Public Integrity.

It was the Center and ICIJ’s first interactive multimedia presentation of its kind, integrating experimental technology to create an immersive experience. The project combines video, data-driven graphics, audio, stills and text in a documentary-style narrative. The multimedia feature was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

The Center also won EPPY awards for Best use of Data/Infographics with under 1 million unique monthly visitors for Who’s Trying to Influence Your Vote? Tracking TV Ad Wars in the 2014 Election, and Best Community Service on a Media-Affiliated Website with under 1 million unique monthly visitors for Criminalizing Kids, a collaboration with Reveal Radio.

It was the second year in a row that four Center projects have been recognized with EPPYs.

Congratulations to all the winners.

ICIJ is a nonprofit news organization dedicated to collaborative investigative journalism. You can support ICIJ’s work in a number of ways:

Get in touch: ICIJ encourages tip-offs from the public, story ideas, as well as outstanding investigative journalists interested in collaborating with us
Sign up: Join ICIJ’s mailing list to receive regular updates and the latest news from our network
Donate: Your contribution will help ICIJ continue investigating issues that don’t stop at national borders
Share our work: Follow ICIJ on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ and share our stories