After five attempts and three appearances on the shortlist of the Kurt Schork Awards in International Journalism, multiple award-winning investigative journalist Fisayo Soyombo has emerged the 2020 winner of the Local Reporter category of the competition.
In a press statement on Thursday by Thomson Reuters Foundation, Fisayo won for his undercover investigation on Nigeria’s criminal justice system funded by TheCable and the International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR).
With a pseudonym, Soyombo feigned an offence for which he was arrested and spent five days in a Lagos police cell and then eight days in Ikoyi prison.
The judges commended his “vivid and compelling three-part series” which exposed “the everyday corruption and abuses of Nigeria’s criminal justice system”.
Soyombo dedicated the award to his mum for being the first to back his decision to ditch his academic study disciple, Agriculture for journalism in his first year in the University.
Olatunji Ololade of The Nation was one of the finalists for the Local Reporter Category, while Phillip Obaji was in contention for the Freelance category won by Shah Meer Baloch from Pakistan.
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Kamiran Sadoun from Syria won the News Fixer award.
Now in its 19th year, the Kurt Schork Awards is named after American freelance journalist Kurt Schork who was killed in Sierra Leone while on assignment for Reuters in 2000.
A shortlist of eight in both the Freelance and Local Reporter categories was judged by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Tina Rosenberg, The Intercept’s Peter Maass, and The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson.
The three winners will each receive a cash prize of US $5000.
