Adebulu is TheCable’s Journalist of the Year

Multiple award-winning journalist and Head, Fact-Check at TheCable, Taiwo Adebulu, has been named the publication’s Journalist of the Year 2021.

On Friday, the newspaper’s editors announced him as the recipient of the annual award which recognises journalists within the ranks of TheCable “who have demonstrated industry, resilience and self-motivation as well as having produced impact stories during the year”.

“For a newspaper that rewards excellence, this award does not really come to me as a surprise. I’ve always known that good rewards come with hard work. Being picked by the editors of the newspaper as the best journalist of the year means a lot to me. It shows my commitment and dedication so far and I want to do more,” Adebulu told Media Career when asked for his response to winning the award.

“Going forward, I believe this honour will inspire me to do better in 2022. I want to pursue under-reported stories with rigour. I want to push hard to tell those stories that will create impact and institute changes in my country,” he added.

Adebulu was picked as the winner following the impact of his undercover investigation at the Federal Marriage Registry, Ikoyi, Lagos State, which exposed the extortion and untold corruption by government officials.

After the publication of the story funded by ZAM Magazine, a Netherlands-based media organisation, the ministry of internal affairs stopped manual registration and directed all applicants to go online in an attempt to tackle the graft-ridden process.

Chinedu Asadu, now with the Associated Press (AP)  was the winner of the inaugural award in 2020.

Adebulu, a graduate of Language Arts from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife who holds a Masters in Communication Arts, University of Ibadan,  began his journalism career in 2014 as a freelance reporter with The Nation.

In 2017, he won the Zimeo Excellence in Media awards in Ethiopia with a report he wrote for TheCable as a freelance journalist.

The judges rated his report, Inside Ondo community where children fish in the Atlantic Ocean to raise school fees, as the best in the SDG category.

He joined TheCable full-time in February 2018 and was a finalist in The Future Awards Africa Prize for Journalism in the same year. Adebulu also emerged as a finalist at the 2018 Nigeria Media Merit Awards (NMMA).

In 2020, he won the PwC Media Excellence Awards.  and also won the overall prize at the African Fact-Checking Awards 2020 for his investigative piece that exposed the falsehood of a claim by the Nigerian government at the UN general assembly.

In 2021, Adebulu was longlisted for the 2021 edition of the One World Media (OWM) journalism award and also got an honourable mention on the winning list of the 20th SEJ Awards for Reporting on the Environment.

He is a corps member of the America-based Report for the World (RFW), an initiative from The GroundTruth Project which supports “ground up” journalism to serve under-covered corners of the world.

In his year-end message, Simon Kolawole, founder and CEO of TheCable, thanked the staff of the newspaper for remaining faithful to the core values of TheCable: independence, impartiality, integrity, defence of the public interest and respect for diversity.

“From the criteria for the awards, we can see the motive: to reward and encourage hard work, initiative and result-oriented journalism,” Kolawole said.