Dublin Inquirer is among the winners of this year’s European Press Prize for its part in a project examining the financialisation of the housing market across Europe.
Cities for Rent: Investigating Corporate Landlords across Europe won the Innovation Award for finding new ways to engage with audiences.
The seven-month project was co-ordinated by the Amsterdam-based Arena for Journalism in Europe. It involved a team of more than 25 investigative and data journalists and visualisations experts from 16 European countries. Dublin Inquirer journalists Lois Kapila and Laoise Neylon mapped Dublin’s growing constellation of corporate landlords, looked at the impact of build-to-rent housing on the market and documented tenants’ experience of corporate landlords in the capital.
The winners of this year’s awards in the European Press Prize’s 10th year were announced in Madrid on Thursday at a ceremony addressed by Ukrainian journalist Olga Rudenko. Bastian Berbner and John Goetz from the German weekly Die Zeit won the Distinguished Reporting Award for What Guantánamo Made of Them, the story of Mohomadeu Slahi meeting the man who tortured him.
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Paavo Teittinen from the Helsingen Sanomat won the Investigative Reporting Award for The Investigation Is Closed, which exposed irregularities and misconduct in the Finnish police’s handling of human trafficking cases. Ukrainian Peter Pomerantsev won the Public Discourse Award for Memory in the Age of Impunity published in Georgia by Coda Story, which looks at why the public loses interest so quickly in important stories, from Belarus to the Philippines.
The judges’ Special Award went to Lara Bonilla, Ricard Marfà, Idoia Longan of Catalonia’s Diari ARA for Women’s Body, Men’s Medicine, which looks at how gender inequality in medical research has left doctors with an inadequate understanding of women’s bodies.
The judging panel, chaired by former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, includes Le Monde’s editorial director Sylvie Kauffmann, Süddeutsche Zeitung deputy editor-in-chief Alexandra Foederl-Schmid, El Diario co-founder Juan Luis Sanchez, Dutch political columnist Sheila Sitalsing and Cumhuriyet’s former editor-in chief Can Dündar. The prize is funded by newspaper-owning trusts including the Guardian Foundation, Denmark’s Politiken and The Irish Times.
Speaking ahead of Thursday’s award ceremony, Yoeri Albrecht, director of Amsterdam’s theatre and political debate centre De Balie and a member of the board of the prize, said its purpose was to make the best journalism from all parts of the continent more widely read.
“We set up the European Press Prize 10 years ago in De Balie, in Amsterdam, to shed light on the amazingly diverse, brave, important and well-produced journalism that flourishes in every corner of our continent. We hoped that by honouring it, good-quality journalism becomes more appreciated and widely consumed. Journalism is vital for the survival of democracy and the rule of law,” he said.
