2024 Wole Soyinka Award for Investigative Reporting winners

Winners have emerged for various award categories from the final shortlists of the 2024(19th) Wole Soyinka Award for Investigative Reporting.

There was however no overall Investigative Reporter of The Year winner as the award judges complained of the declining quality of investigative reports.

Commended works, runners-up and some winners of the six categories of the award were announced and presented their awards on the night of December 9, 2024, at the MUSON Centre Lagos after the conclusion of the virtual Amplify In-depth Media Conference by the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism.

The award categories include Online, Print, Radio, TV, Photojournalism, Editorial Cartoon and the overall Investigative Reporter of the Year category which is given to the most outstanding investigative report.

There were winners, runners-up and commended works for all categories except the Radio category which did not have a winner due to the judges deeming the works submitted did not meet the threshold for a winner.

According to the chair of the 2024 WSAIR Judges Panel, Director of News and Editor-In-chief of TVC News, Mrs Stella Din-Jacob, there were 291 entries submitted for this edition, but many of them did not meet the required standard of the award, some were reports misconstrued to be an investigation.

“The centre received a total of 219 entries from 153 journalists, where 45 (29.4%) came from females and 108 (70.5% ) came from male journalists, in total 191 entries were sent to the screening committee and this was narrowed down to 111 which came to the judges.

“And in the course of this year’s exercise, many entries did not make the cut for a few reasons, some basically lack the most obvious element, investigation.

“Some of the entries showed a disconnect between the journalist on the field who was telling the story and how much of themselves they put into investigating that story in ensuring that there was a connect with anyone who was either watching it or reading it.

“Other entries were feature stories that had all of the elements but were inappropriate for this category of award.”

Highlighting issues that must be addressed against the next edition of the award, Mrs DIn-Jacob said what the judges needed to see in the stories was not evident.

“ The ingenuity of it, the creative ways in which those stories were put together and how much risk were taken, in a lot of those stories that was not evident.”

She encouraged journalists to push the boundaries of storytelling and female journalists to step up their efforts in investigations.

According to her, three is need for training and retraining of journalists by their media organisation and mentoring by veterans of the craft to improve the quality of investigative stories produced and the professionalism of journalists doing the stories.

You can read her full judges’ remark on the 19th WSAIR herehere.