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NYT Reporter Sam Dolnick Receives 2012 Worth Bingham Prize

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

During the Worth Bingham Prize dinner on May 9, 2013, New York Times reporter Sam Dolnick spoke about what it took to produce Unlocked: Inside New Jersey’s Halfway Houses. He credited editors Clifford J. Levy and Carolyn Ryan with providing the formula for his award-winning series: “You need personal stories to make statistics come alive; you need sympathetic characters the reader will connect with; you need data/statistics to be fully digested so that you can write with authority in every sentence; you need primary documents that no one has ever seen before; and you need to get everything on the record,” said Dolnick. “This work is rare and it’s hard and expensive but it’s crucially important. It’s also lonely – investigative reporting – it’s hard.”

During his 10-month investigation, Dolnick discovered a broken and horribly flawed correctional system in which gang activity, drug use, sexual assaults and other violent behavior were commonplace and where lax security led to thousands of escapes. “Unlocked” prompted calls for change and led to hearings in both houses of New Jersey’s state legislature, resulting in the introduction of 14 reform bills.

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Learn more about “Unlocked” and the Worth Bingham Prize »

Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism

The Worth Bingham Prize honors investigative reporting of stories of national significance where the public interest is being ill-served.

These stories may involve state, local or national government, lobbyists or the press itself wherever there exists an "atmosphere of easy tolerance" that Worth Bingham himself once described in his reporting on the nation's capital.

The investigative reporting may cover actual violations of the law, rule or code; lax or ineffective administration or enforcement; or activities which create conflicts of interest, entail excessive secrecy or otherwise raise questions of propriety.

Judges will be guided by such factors as obstacles overcome in getting information, accuracy, clarity of analysis and writing style, magnitude of the situation, and impact on the public, including any reforms that may have resulted.

The $20,000 prize for reporting in 2012 will be presented at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard in Cambridge, Mass. in the spring of 2013.