Transparency, Accountability, Vulnerable Sources: Guidance From The 2025 Collier Awardees

In his keynote speech at the April 10 ceremony honoring the inaugural winners of the Peter F. Collier Award for Ethics in Journalism, former New York Times executive editor and Collier judge Dean Baquet explained what makes the Collier awards “something special” among journalism prizes.

Most journalism awards honor the final product of the reporting and editing process, but the Collier Awards, Baquet said, asked judges “to focus not only on the quality of the work, but the decisions reporters and editors made to ensure fairness.” 

The Collier Awards, in other words, celebrate the journalism process, commending reporters and editors for the ethical choices underlying their published work. They are a project of NYU’s Ethics and Journalism Initiative.

Collier Award winners delved deeply into the ethics of their reporting and editing at a three-part April 11 symposium at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. Journalists who produced the nine prize-winning pieces told a highly engaged audience about how they confronted and resolved the ethical challenges that arose during the reporting and editing process.

Giving agency to vulnerable sources

Protecting vulnerable sources was a critical consideration for many of the Collier winners, whose work addressed issues ranging from childhood sexual abuse and labor trafficking to surveillance of Chinese migrants and Afghan allies marooned after the U.S. military withdrawal.

During the first panel, moderated by former Columbia Journalism Review Executive Editor Sewell Chan, Washington Post reporters Jessica Contrera and Jenn Abelson described how they sent letters to children who survived sexual assault by law enforcement officers in order to give the survivors time and space to decide whether to speak to them. (The Post’s comprehensive, multipart series. Abused by the Badge, won top honors in the national/international category.) 

Once survivors agreed to talk, Contrera and Abelson said, they assured sources right up until the eve of publication that they had full agency over how much of their stories would be told publicly. When abusers provided comment to the Post, Contrera and Abelson told survivors about their abusers’ accounts – and sometimes made last-minute decisions about how to use the material based on their sources’ responses.

During an afternoon panel moderated by Ethics and Journalism Initiative Managing Editor Ryan Howzell, Baltimore Banner reporters Julie Scharper and Jessica Calefati similarly described the long, slow process of winning and keeping the trust of sources who first told the nonprofit news outlet about alleged sexual abuse and coverup by leaders of the Baltimore-based megachurch Great Grace World Outreach. Scharper said her final, two-hour fact-checking session with one skittish source was so intense that she had to go for a run in the woods afterward, but Calefati said she was ultimately gratified by how many once-reluctant sources decided to speak openly to the Banner.

Explaining the Risks of Going Public

For two other Collier winners, Rong Xiaoqing and Ariane Luthi, the challenge was assuring that key sources fully understood the risk of telling their stories publicly. Rong said that of the dozens of sources she spoke with, only a handful were willing to talk on the record after she explained the potential consequences of being quoted by name. For those few, Rong said, she took an additional “counterintuitive” step of asking why they wanted to speak openly, to assure that they did not have unrealistic expectations. (Rong’s editor, Max Siegelbaum of Documented, said Documented journalists, as a rule, are careful to educate sources about potential fallout from talking on the record.)

Luthi, who wrote for Foreign Policy about an Afghan military pilot whose family has not received special visas to come to the U.S., was unable to attend the symposium so was represented on the panel by her Columbia Journalism School thesis adviser, Helen Benedict. The pilot at the heart of Luthi’s story insisted on using his own name and identifying details, despite the risk of Taliban retaliation against his family. Benedict, a novelist and journalist whose own work focuses on refugees, advised Luthi to inform herself about that risk in order to help the pilot make an informed decision.

“Ariane went over and over it with him at every different stage,” Benedict said. “Are you sure you’re okay with this? Are you still sure?” Looking back, Benedict said, her only regret about Luthi’s story is that she didn’t suggest providing a full explanation in the piece about the pilot’s decision to use his real name.

Building Trust By Showing Your Work

That kind of transparency was a theme of Chan’s panel, which, in addition to the Post reporters, included Pramod Acharya and Andrew Lehren, who were part of an international consortium of journalists that exposed the exploitation of Amazon workers in Saudi Arabia; and Madeleine Baran and Parker Yesko, who led The New Yorker’s nine-part In The Dark podcast investigation of the U.S. military’s 2005 killing of 24 unarmed civilians in the Iraqi town of Haditha.

The New Yorker’s Baran and Yesko talked about their commitment to publishing the documents, photographs and data – including the war crimes database they built essentially from scratch – that they had uncovered, often with the help and consent of their Iraqi sources. But they also explained how the podcast format allows journalists to engage listeners in the investigative process, including not just intimate human moments but the sometimes tedious work of prying information from the government.

“Ideally, the listener is on a quest with us,” Baran said. “The idea is that they feel the same frustration that we feel because all we really are in this role is stand-ins for the public.”

Going in the Front Door at Amazon

Acharya and Lehren discussed Lehren’s decision to inform Amazon, at a relatively early stage of the reporting process, that the consortium had interviewed dozens of workers about illegal recruiting fees, squalid living and working conditions and potential labor trafficking. Even within the group working on the investigation, Lehren said, the decision to be fully transparent with Amazon in the midst of the investigation was “controversial,” since the company could have tried to obstruct or undermine the consortium’s reporting.

“Sometimes journalists may go through the motions but we really did want to hear what Amazon had to say,” Lehren said.

The company, which told Lehren it had never worked with such transparent journalists before, vindicated Lehren’s decision by confirming, early on, that the group’s initial on-the-record sources had been trustworthy employees, giving Acharya confidence to push on. Ultimately, Amazon agreed to establish a $2 million fund to compensate about 700 workers.

Holding the Powerful to Account Without Compromising Fairness 

A panel led by Ethics and Journalism Initiative founder Stephen J. Adler focused on fairness in accountability reporting. The discussion among Mississippi Today Editor- In-Chief Adam Ganucheau and student journalists Garrett Shanley of the University of Florida and Cathy Wang of Johns Hopkins University revealed that rigorous investigative reporting requires thick skin and a strong stomach.

Wang, for instance, had to wait weeks for a response from the university to her query about the impact on local communities of the school’s real estate development projects. Wang sent detailed questions to Johns Hopkins officials but heard nothing back. Only after a month of repeated follow-up requests did she give an ultimatum to the school–provide a comment or we’ll publish without it – finally prompting a response.

Shanley was the first-place winner in the Collier student category for his expose in the Chronicle of Higher Education about a showdown between then-university president Ben Sasse and liberal arts professors concerned about a new, GOP-backed center for classical and civic education. Shanley painstakingly reconstructed the mounting tension between the professors and university administrators, using sophisticated reporting techniques to protect his sources.

Shanley described the Excel spreadsheet he used to keep track of his sources and other people in the story, including those he expected to decline comment. University president Sasse, a former U.S. Senator, never responded to Shanley’s queries, Shanley said. . Another university official not only declined to respond  to Shanley’s phone and email queries but also, when Shanley went to his office in a laudable last-ditch attempt to obtain comment, refused to shake Shanley’s hand.

“We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know”

Ganucheau, whose newsroom won the top Collier Award in the local category, reminded the audience that journalists have to keep asking questions of their targets, even when merely asking carries risk.

Mississippi Today was honored for continuing to cover the state’s $77 million welfare scandal in the face of a potentially crippling defamation lawsuit by former Mississippi governor Phil Bryant. Bryant sued Mississippi Today after the newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on the misuse of funds intended for the state’s poorest residents. Bryant’s lawyer, Ganucheau said, explicitly threatened to expand the lawsuit if Mississippi Today mentioned the former governor in additional stories about the scandal.

The paper not only continued its coverage, Ganucheau said, but took pains to reach out to Bryant’s lawyer for fair comment every time it prepared to publish a new story.

“That’s what we do,” Ganucheau said. “We don’t know what we don’t know, and as ethical journalists, we should be pulling on every possible string we can to get the fullest, most complete picture of anything that we are covering. If we are not reaching out to the principle [subject] of what we’re working on, we are potentially missing that.”

By the end of the symposium, it was impossible not to reflect on a comment Chan made during the first session of the day. His words were directed to the Post, New Yorker, Guardian and NBC journalists on the first panel, but apply just as well to the reporters and editors who shared details of their processes with the audience.

“This is real journalism,” Chan said. “If the average American knew the care, the attention, the precision, the method, the rigor that you all use, the ethical decision-making about not exacerbating further harm, the giving a chance, whether it’s to a police chief or an Amazon official, to tell their side, I think people would be awfully impressed, awfully appreciative of the trust that you’ve earned.”