Sponsored by the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, the Chicago Headline Club each year awards a cash prize for enterprising journalism that defends and protects everyday folks. The Watchdog Award honors Chicago-area news reporting that calls attention to situations in which the public is being harmed or poorly served.
This year, we received 12 Watchdog Award entries from a range of print, digital and broadcast news outlets in Chicago, including a number of collaborative efforts. We had three finalists for the 2020 Watchdog Award:
The finalists are:
1.) ProPublica Illinois “COVID Inequities” by Staff
2.) ProPublica Illinois “Grace: Failures in Michigan’s juvenile justice system” by Jodi S. Cohen & Duaa Eldeib
3.) WBBM CBS 2 “Left in the Dark” by Samah Assad, Christopher Hacker, Dave Savini
The judges’ choice for the Headline Club’s Investigative Reporting grant, out of six submissions, is an investigative project by a freelancer focused on a pattern of more than 50 unsolved murders of Black and Latina women and girls on the South and West sides dating back 20 years.
To learn more about past Watchdog Award-winners, visit this page. For rules and history of the award, visit here.