Herald Sun sport reporter Michael Warner has been awarded the top honour at the Melbourne Press Club awards for his scoop on a report that found “systemic racism” at Collingwood football club, which prompted the resignation of club president Eddie McGuire.
Guardian Australia also received two awards after five nominations.
The judges said Warner’s “genuine scoop set in train a series of events that rocked Australia’s biggest sporting club and its high-profile president to the core”.
News.com.au’s political editor Samantha Maiden received the Graham Perkin award for investigative journalism for her reporting on the alleged rape of former Liberal Party staffer Brittany Higgins. Accepting the award, Maiden said she would not speak further about the case, which is currently before the court, but thanked Higgins for trusting her with the story.
The Age’s veteran football writer, Caroline Wilson, received a lifetime achievement award for 40 years covering the AFL, a career that was acknowledged as “smashing the glass ceiling” for women in sports reporting. She recounted attending a football writers’ dinner as the first woman to ever to be granted admittance, and being “given an apron and taken up to the kitchen” because they assumed she was there to help.
Guardian Australia’s inequality editor, Luke Henriques-Gomes, won the quill for reporting on disability affairs for his work reporting on the National Disability Insurance Commission, including the revelation that a family who won a landmark case over NDIS transport funding were now facing another cut to their support.
The judges said Henriques-Gomes’ work “stood out for revealing widespread problems in the administration and provision of services” under the NDIS and “exposed how the NDIS has turned into a bureaucratic and legal nightmare for those often poorly placed to advocate for themselves”.
Matilda Boseley was awarded the quill for innovation in journalism for reports she wrote, filmed, starred in and produced for Guardian Australia’s Tiktok account, which have amassed tens of millions of views worldwide.
The judges said Boseley’s work was “a remarkable individual effort” which combined clear and accurate journalism “with a refreshing and clever approach to reaching new audiences on a platform not known for its journalistic reach. A remarkable individual effort.”
Business reporter Ben Butler was highly commended for the Grant Hattam award for investigative journalism for his work on the Pandora Papers, a joint production between Guardian Australia, the ABC’s Elise Worthington, and Mario Christodoulou, and the Australian Financial Review’s Liam Walsh and Neil Chenoweth. That award was won by Nick Mckenzie and Joel Tozer, for their investigation inside Australian neo-Nazi groups.
Guardian Australia sports writer Jonathan Horn was a finalist for the Harry Gordon Australian sports journalist of the year, which was won by Warner.
Reporter Caitlin Cassidy was a finalist for the young journalist of the year award, won by the Herald Sun’s Olivia Jenkins, who was arrested covering anti-lockdown protests in Melbourne last year.
And Margaret Simmons and photographer Chris Hopkins were finalists for the award for reporting on multicultural affairs, for a report detailing the lives of those impacted by the lockdown of nine Melbourne public housing towers during. That award was won by a far-reaching report into racism in Australia by the ABC’s Bang Xiao, Jarrod Fankhauser and Steven Viney, which was published in both English and Chinese.
