Ghanaian breaks 26-year-old dominance of US-based business journalists
His work described as model for journalism
The Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism at Columbia University is already hard to get in. It’s been described as the Fellowship for ‘the brightest and best in business journalism’. This exclusive group of elite journalists numbering about 500 alumni to-date also have to compete for an annual prize for the best in business reporting.
Every year, the full scholarship Fellowship is awarded to 10 top-notch business journalists to study for a year at Columbia University. Most of them American journalists. Out of the about 500 Fellows, there are about 10 from Africa, the rest from Asia and Latin America.
The Christopher J. Welles Prize for excellent business reporting, has been running for 26 years. It was called ‘Best of Knight-Bagehot Award’ when it was established in 1996. It was renamed in 2010 to honour the memory of Christopher J. Welles. Welles, a former director of the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship, was also a leading business writer from the 1960s to the 1980s, and he was known for his penetrating accounts of corporate abuse, corruption, corporate collapses and misbehavior.
Dogbevi has been consistent in doing outstanding journalism – covering neglected and hard to cover areas with very little and sometimes, no resources. But he has remained a perceptive, courageous and dedicated journalist in a country where business journalism in the real sense of the word doesn’t exist.
The list of winners since the award’s inception is decorated by extra-ordinary journalists from the New York Times, Seattle Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Business Week, The Financial Times, Bloomberg, AP among others. All these remarkable journalists, however work for US-based news outlets.
But for the first time, a Ghanaian journalist, the first Ghanaian Fellow, based in Accra has broken the dominance of journalists working for US-based news outlets. Emmanuel K Dogbevi of Ghana Business News becomes the first journalist working for a news outlet outside of the US to win the highly regarded business journalism award for this exclusive club of top business journalists, sharing the limelight with his classmate, Jeff Horwitz of the Wall Street Journal, who is also making history for winning the award for the second time. Horwitz won the Prize for the first time in 2018 while he worked with the Associated Press. The two were in the Bagehot class of 2013-2014.
Dogbevi, who launched Ghana Business News in 2008, was cited for his stories on financial corruption in Ghana and exploitation of the country’s natural resources.
The Christopher J. Welles Prize for excellent business reporting, has been running for 26 years. It was called ‘Best of Knight-Bagehot Award’ when it was established in 1996. The list of winners since its inception is decorated by extra-ordinary journalists.
“We are proud of how Emmanuel Dogbevi has used the skills he gained through the Knight-Bagehot programme in his relentless reporting on corruption in Ghana,” said Robert Smith, director of the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship.
“Emmanuel’s reporting spans a wide range, and he does it on his own without the benefit of an institutional infrastructure. His commitment to finding the truth stayed strong even in the face of personal setbacks, including a 2020 office fire that destroyed his archives and equipment. His work stands as a model for the profession,” he added.
Dogbevi has been consistent in doing outstanding journalism – covering neglected and hard to cover areas with very little and sometimes, no resources. But he has remained a perceptive, courageous and dedicated journalist in a country where business journalism in the real sense of the word doesn’t exist.
“Those stories are complicated, deep and difficult to pull off,” wrote one judge. “Going through a cache of financial documents and making sense of them is really tough. And Emmanuel is doing it under difficult circumstances, on a shoestring.”
Horwitz was awarded the Prize for his reporting on “The Facebook Files,” a series that dove into internal documents to reveal the company’s own research and awareness of the harms and dangers of its platform. The series “exposed the harm done by the company on a global scale,” wrote one judge. “Jeff found a whistleblower who helped provide the backbone of his explosive reporting and then drew world-wide attention when Congress held hearings based on her statements and Jeff’s reporting.”
By Peter Quarshie
Copyright ©2022 by NewsBridge Africa
All rights reserved. This article or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in reviews.