The Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy is pleased to announce that The Washington Post’s Opinions series “Who is Government?” is the winner of the inaugural Goldsmith Prize for Explanatory Reporting. The prize will be awarded at the 2025 Goldsmith Awards ceremony on April 3 at the JFK Jr. Forum at Harvard Kennedy School.
“This new prize was created to honor journalism that does the hard work of explaining essential institutions: how does the government actually work, who are the players, what is the essence of serving the public,” said Shorenstein Director Nancy Gibbs. “The team at The Washington Post captured the extraordinary work of the ordinary people who commit to making our lives better, safer, freer. As budgets are slashed and entire departments dissolved, I can think of no better time to tell their stories.”
Seven writers — Michael Lewis, Casey Cep, Dave Eggers, John Lanchester, Geraldine Brooks, Sarah Vowell, and W. Kamau Bell — were “set loose on the federal bureaucracy” and given the same brief: find a story about public service. Each piece, taken together, helped shine a light on the value of government work and the dedicated civil servants that are rarely written about or celebrated:
Lewis found an engineer in the Bureau of Mines who singlehandedly revolutionized mining safety.
Cep discovered an official at Veterans Affairs who created a culture of care and excellence in our national cemeteries, the resting place of America’s fallen.
Eggers zeroed in on a group of scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories obsessed with finding planets hospitable to life.
Lanchester chose to profile a number — the Consumer Price Index — and in so doing explained how data-gathering is essential to the American Project.
Brooks unearthed an IRS agent who also investigates cybercrimes — and is a black-belt sommelier in his free time.
Vowell wrote about the democratization of our defining documents by chronicling the efforts of an innovator at the National Archives.
And Bell, using video, audio and text, profiled a member of the next generation of civil servants: his goddaughter, who was a paralegal at the Department of Justice.
About the Goldsmith Prize for Explanatory Reporting
The new Goldsmith Prize for Explanatory Reporting seeks to honor and inspire excellent reporting that illuminates the “how” of governance in the United States – how public policy is implemented, how government systems and processes work, and what citizens can better understand about what government does. The winner of the Goldsmith Prize for Explanatory Reporting receives $15,000, to be awarded directly to the winning journalist or team.
Financial support for the Goldsmith Awards Program is provided by an annual grant from the Goldsmith Fund of the Greenfield Foundation. The program is administered by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. To learn more about the Goldsmith Awards visit goldsmithawards.org.
