Thursday, March 25, 2021 – The Shorenstein Center hosted a panel discussion with the finalists for the 2021 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, ProPublica’s Neil Bedi, IndyStar’s Tony Cook, The Washington Post health reporter Dan Diamond, The News & Observer’s Joseph Neff, Reuters data journalist Janet Roberts, and The Marshall Project’s Abbie VanSickle. The conversation was moderated by Setti Warren, former Shorenstein Center executive director and 2021 Goldsmith Prize judge, and current executive director of Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics. Visit the brand new GoldsmithAwards.org to learn about this year’s finalists, and to browse the archives from the past three decades of the Goldsmith Awards.
The winner will be announced at the Goldsmith Awards Ceremony on April 13th at 6pm ET. Register here to watch live.
You can find a recording of the panel discussion below. Special thanks to GBH’s Forum Network for streaming and recording this event for us!
Neil Bedi joined ProPublica’s Washington, D.C., newsroom in 2021. He was previously an investigative reporter at the Tampa Bay Times. His reporting with Kathleen McGrory into the alarming death rate at the cardiac surgery unit of a Florida children’s hospital won the George Polk Award and was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. In addition, he has twice been named a finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists. Bedi graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles Samueli School of Engineering.
Tony Cook is a reporter for IndyStar’s investigations team. He has written about housing fraud, abuses at the state’s veterans affairs agency and allegations of sexual misconduct against Indiana’s attorney general. Before that he covered Mike Pence’s time as governor and his ascent to the White House. Cook has won statewide investigative reporting awards in Ohio and Indiana and is also a recipient of an EPPY award and the Upton Sinclair Memorial Award for workplace safety reporting.
Dan Diamond is a national health reporter for The Washington Post, focused on accountability, federal agencies and the coronavirus pandemic. He joined The Post in 2021 after covering the Trump administration for Politico. Diamond’s high-impact reporting has helped spark congressional investigations, inspector general probes and the resignation of HHS Secretary Tom Price. Diamond also has done prize-winning reporting on hospitals’ community obligations and deep investigations of the nation’s most vulnerable populations. Diamond’s coverage of political appointees’ interference with the coronavirus response and other 2020 priorities won the George Polk award for investigative reporting.
Joseph Neff is an investigative reporter who worked at The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., and The Associated Press. He was a Pulitzer finalist and has won awards including the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, the MOLLY National Journalism Prize, the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi and others. He was a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University.
Janet Roberts heads the data journalism team at Reuters. She and two other Reuters reporters were finalists in 2015 for the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Journalism and the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting for The Echo Chamber, a project examining the elite group of lawyers that dominates the U.S. Supreme Court docket. She co-edited the Reuters project Hidden Injustice, exploring secrecy in U.S. federal courts, which last year won an American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award for legal reporting. Before Reuters, she worked at the New York Times, the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the Wilmington Star-News.
Abbie VanSickle covers criminal justice in California for The Marshall Project. She has worked as a reporter for the University of California, Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program, the Center for Investigative Reporting and the Tampa Bay Times. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. She is a graduate of the UC Berkeley School of Law and a lecturer at its Graduate School of Journalism. From 2011 to 2012, she was a Henry Luce Scholar in Cambodia, where she worked on behalf of survivors at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal.
