2025 Overseas Press Club honors for The Post
The Post's coverage of Gaza has won the inaugural Shireen Abu Akleh Award for innovative reporting, previously known as the Continuing Coverage of Conflict Award, introduced last year to honor the best reporting on a continuing international conflict or crisis in any medium. The Post's Middle East team, together with colleagues in our Visual Forensics and Rapid Response Investigations teams, along with graphics, video, photo and design, spent a year reporting on Israeli tactics in Gaza and their human toll — advancing new investigative methods to cover the conflict from the outside in and delivering a series of essential, accountability-driven stories.
Post reporters quantified Israel's systematic destruction of the enclave, revealed how the military was laying the groundwork for long-term occupation, delved into the motivations of its soldiers and interrogated the high-profile killings of journalists and other civilians.
The OPC judges said the coverage was 'vividly conveyed and assiduously reported. The Washington Post tore at official narratives through accountability journalism that centered the human costs of Israel's war in Gaza. The package is a masterclass of innovative, rigorous and empathetic storytelling.'
Earning a win in the Robert Spiers Benjamin Award was 'The Takeover' for the best reporting in any medium on Latin America. In early 2024, The Post reported on how the Galápagos Islands, the UNESCO World Heritage site, was being pulled into the booming drug trade consuming much of Latin America. As the piece was being finalized, Ecuador nearly collapsed in a paroxysm of gang violence that led President Daniel Noboa to declare: 'We are in a state of war.'
Over the course of 2024, beginning with a detailed reconstruction of what happened during Ecuador's near implosion on Jan. 9, 2024, The Post has examined the expanding power of criminal gangs in Latin America. 'The Takeover' is a revelatory, deeply reported and gripping series on the transformation of organized crime and how its growth is undermining democracy and fomenting violence in every corner of the continent, including the most remote parts of the Amazon.
'The series took readers across Latin America to show how criminal gangs have seized control of growing swaths of societies, undermined democratic rule and fomented violence in nearly every corner of the region.' The judges said. 'Post reporters used vividly drawn characters to illustrate a changing landscape of drug and human trafficking, extortion and environmental crime.'
The Post series 'Repression's Long Arm' earned a runner-up citation in the William Worthy Award, which recognizes the best newspaper, news service or digital interpretation of international affairs. This series is the most comprehensive and illuminating investigation to date of the growing willingness of governments to crush dissidents, asylum seekers and journalists seeking refuge abroad. The series shows how countries with democratic traditions, including India and Turkey, are embracing violence and intimidation against dissidents in exile. And The Post unearthed new evidence that the world's most autocratic regimes are expanding and refining their repressive tactics.
Please join us in congratulating our all those who contributed to each of these deeply reported and revelatory series.
The Shireen Abu Akleh Award for best reporting on a continuing international conflict or crisis in any medium:
· Revenge, fire and destruction: A year of Israeli soldiers' videos from Gaza
· Gaza's uncounted dead
· The long road to reconstruction
· What Israel's strategic corridor in Gaza reveals about its postwar plans
· Israel is demolishing northern Gaza and fortifying military positions, imagery shows
· Palestinian paramedics said Israel gave them safe passage to save a 6-year-old girl in Gaza. They were all killed.
· Drone footage raises questions about Israeli justification for deadly strike on Gaza journalists
The Robert Spiers Benjamin Award for the best reporting in any medium on Latin America:
· How drug traffickers made the Galápagos Islands their gas station
· A narco revolt takes a once-peaceful nation to the brink
· How Mexico's cartels infiltrated the tortilla business
· A double life: The cocaine kingpin who hid as a professional soccer player
· As a trafficker pursued dreams of soccer glory, investigators closed in
· As smuggling rings made billions from migrants, the U.S. was sidelined
· South America's most dangerous gang invades the Amazon forest
· A global boom in cocaine trafficking defies decades of anti-drug efforts
· A South American waterway become a cocaine superhighway – to Europe
The William Worthy Award for the best newspaper, news service, newsletter or digital interpretation of international affairs:
· An assassination plot on American soil reveals a darker side of Modi's India
· In India's shadow war with Pakistan, a campaign of covert killings
· A plot in paradise and India's struggle for influence in Asia
· How China extended its repression into an American city
· He thought he had escaped Beijing's clutches only to vanish back into China
· Iran turns to Hells Angels and other criminal gangs to target critics
· Turkey exploits post-9/11 counterterrorism model to target critics in exile
· They fled in fear from a U.S. ally. So it went after their families.
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