• The shortlist is announced on Monday for the 2014 Paul Foot award, set up by Private Eye and the Guardian in 2005 in memory of Foot and to celebrate the kind of investigative and campaigning journalism his work exemplified.
Richard Brooks and Andrew Bousfield of Private Eye are nominated for unravelling the details of a corrupt UK-Saudi contract and going on to expose the “decades of bribery” involved in previous arms deals between the two countries.
The Sunday Times’s Jonathan Calvert and Heidi Blake reported on the millions of Fifa documents leaked by a whistleblower, focusing on the efforts to win votes for a World Cup bid by Qatar’s top football official. George Monbiot of the Guardian criticised the rush to blame building on flood plains for the impact on households of last year’s winter floods, arguing that the role of subsidy-encouraged bad farming methods had been overlooked. The Daily Telegraph’s Claire Newell, Holly Watt, Claire Duffin and Ben Bryant uncovered further Fifa scandals, shedding more light on how Qatar won support for its successful bid for the 2022 World Cup.
The Daily Mail’s Richard Pendlebury reported on the hard lives of some of Britain’s migrant communities, including immigrants from Bangladesh, Lithuania and Pakistan. Dominic Ponsford and Will Turvill of Press Gazette’s “Save Our Sources” campaign sought to protect reporters’ confidential sources, after it emerged that police investigating Plebgate had seized a Sun journalist’s phone records. The Observer’s Mark Townsend reported on allegations of sexual assaults by Serco employees on female detainees at the Yarl’s Wood immigration detention centre.
Of the above, Brooks was the joint winner in 2008, Townsend was shortlisted in 2011 and Calvert and Blake in 2012 and 2013. Among recent winners are the Guardian’s Ian Cobain (2009) and Nick Davies (2011), freelancer Clare Sambrook (2010), the Times’s Andrew Norfolk (2012) and the London Evening Standard’s David Cohen (2013). The 10th winner or winners, revealed on 24 February, will receive £5,000 with £1,000 going to the other shortlistees.