The Royal Statistical Society announced the winners of its Statistical Excellence in Journalism Awards for 2020 on Monday 12th October.
A small number of big media organisations have historically dominated the Awards since their inception in 2007. The BBC has achieved 17 wins and 10 commendations over this 14-year period, with Radio 4 programme More or Less alone contributing three wins and four commendations.
Among traditional print publications, the Financial Times leads with five wins and six commendations; the Guardian has also had four wins and four commendations during this time.
Both the BBC and the FT were well represented again in 2020.
The national broadcaster won in both the Investigative journalism and Regional journalism categories and was highly commended in the Explaining the facts category. The FT did not achieve any wins this year, but received commendations in the Investigative journalism and Data visualisation categories.
Alongside the familiar faces were a pair of publications whose work was featured by the RSS for the first time: British news website UnHerd, and the online iteration of German newspaper Die Zeit.
Zeit Online was winner in the Data visualisation category for its story The Millions Who Left, which explored migration patterns between East and West Germany from 1991 to 2017.
UnHerd took top prize in the Explaining the facts category for science writer Tom Chivers’ piece Do we really have a ‘suicidal generation’?. This was Chivers’ second win in this category after receiving the same award in 2018 for a BuzzFeed article about academic studies on ‘drinking and health’; he also received an Explaining the facts commendation in 2017 for another BuzzFeed piece.
The Awards have been running annually since they were launched by the Society in 2007, when a single prize was awarded by the RSS to Ben Goldacre of The Guardian.
Between 2008 and 2010, separate prizes were awarded for Broadcast and for Print/online articles. Standalone categories for Print and Online were then introduced in 2011, before the Awards were restructured again in 2015. An annual winner is now announced in four separate categories: Data visualisation, Explaining the facts, Investigative journalism and Regional journalism.