Pamela J. Browning of The Post and Courier wins the Executive of the Year Award, and Alberto Ibargüen of the Knight Foundation wins the Great Friend of the Press Award. El Tiempo of Bogotá and La Nación of Buenos Aires also won Digital Transformation and Transformative Sustainability awards.
Miami (September 13, 2023) - The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) awarded renowned Mexican journalist Carmen Aristegui the 2023 Grand Prize for Press Freedom, the highest distinction granted by the institution.
The IAPA's Executive Committee and Awards Committee noted that Aristegui shines for her commitment and courage throughout her career and, in the last year, for raising the standards to favor freedom of expression in Mexico despite adversity.
IAPA President Michael Greenspon, Global Head of Licensing and Print Innovation for The New York Times said: "Carmen Aristegui's solid journalistic path is anchored in her righteousness, courage, and unwavering vocation to shed light on Mexican institutionalism, despite the multiple forces that try to silence her voice in a country where the free press is subject to constant and very dangerous harassment."
Since 1954, the IAPA has awarded the Grand Prize for Press Freedom to journalists, media outlets, and organizations in the Americas that have stood out for their fierce defense and promotion of freedom of the press and freedom of expression or who have suffered abuses and attacks for their work. In recent years, the award has been granted to Nicaraguan Juan Lorenzo Holmann Chamorro, Cuban Henry Constantín Ferreiro, Colombian Jineth Bedoya, Argentinean Magdalena Ruiz Guiñazú, Ecuadorian Diego Cornejo Menacho, American Roberto Cox, as well as collectively and postmortem to murdered Mexican journalists and groups of journalists from Colombia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua, among others.
Aristegui will receive the prize at the IAPA awards ceremony on November 11, during the IAPA General Assembly to be held November 9-12 at the Hilton Reforma Hotel in Mexico City.
New categories
IAPA also granted special awards in four new categories: Great Friend of the Press, Executive of the Year, Digital Transformation, and Transformative Sustainability. These awards will also be presented during the General Assembly in Mexico.
The Great Friend of the Press Award goes to Alberto Ibargüen, president of the Miami, Florida-based Knight Foundation, for his extraordinary philanthropic support of local journalism projects and the sustainability of media as a pillar of democracy. In a letter to Ibargüen, Greenspon stated: "The jury recognized your extraordinary career as a leader of the Knight Foundation and your commitment to the sustainability of journalism and media, in affirmation of the vision of brothers John S. and James L. Knight."
The Foundation led the recent Press Foward initiative by providing $ 150 million for $500 million in an unprecedented effort to strengthen local journalism to prevent the spread of news deserts. Over the past two decades, Ibargüen has overseen the disbursement of $2.5 billion in projects benefiting the arts, education, science, and journalism.
The Executive of the Year award goes to Pamela J. Browning, president and publisher of The Post and Courier, Charleston, South Carolina. The jury recognized Browning for engaging the community through donations to her newsroom, enabling her to support the investigative team in uncovering corruption. The gifts, which exceed $1 million, also support the state's education system through solutions journalism supported by the newspaper's Education Lab and the collaborative journalism project with other media outlets in the state, which it supports financially to make requests for access to public information.
The jury awarded the Digital Transformation prize to La Nación de Buenos Aires because, through its project "LA NACIÓN + Cerca," it seeks to reduce the risk of subscription cancellation by offering more and better content to subscribers. The media presents the problem, the actions undertaken, and the first results, becoming a model for other media with sustainability strategies based on subscriptions.
The Transformative Sustainability Award was granted to El Tiempo de Bogotá for its innovative and disruptive sponsored content initiative on the progress of the peace process, undertaken jointly by the + Contents team of El Tiempo and the Truth Commission, Colombia's official body, whose mandate is to identify groups who participated in the armed conflict and were responsible for human rights violations.
The chair of the Awards Committee, Leonor Mulero, of GFR Media in Puerto Rico, declared that "these four new awards underline the IAPA's commitment to the constant search for innovative and supportive alternatives that contribute to the sustainability of the media and, in this way, to the freedoms of press and expression, which are essential for the production of relevant journalism.
All these recipients of awards, which are non-monetary, will be honored during the IAPA General Assembly in Mexico City.
IAPA is a non-profit organization dedicated to defending and promoting freedom of the press and expression in the Americas. It comprises more than 1,300 publications from the western hemisphere and is based in Miami, Florida, United States.
