2011 IRE Award winners

Honoring the best in investigative journalism

The annual IRE Awards recognize outstanding investigative work and help identify the techniques and resources used to complete each story. Entries are placed in the IRE Resource Center, allowing members to learn from each other. The IRE Awards were established in 1979. Winners from other years can be found on the winners page.

This year's awards will be presented at the 2012 IRE Conference in Boston. Read IRE's press release about this year's awards.

The highest honor IRE can bestow for investigative reporting is the IRE Medal. This year's medal winner in the Small Market Broadcast/Video category is………………

WVUE-TV, New Orleans
“Hiding Behind the Badge”
Lee Zurik, Donny Pearce, Mike Schaefer, Greg Phillips and Marcy Planer.

Judges’ Comments:

- A powerful sheriff and a businessman pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges after Lee Zurik and the WVUE-TV team exposed and detailed their intricate scheme to defraud taxpayers. Through public records requests and scrutiny of thousands of pages of documents, the team built spreadsheets that proved how a local sheriff spent hundreds of thousands of dollars from his donors on a lavish lifestyle, falsified campaign documents and profited from the BP oil spill. Congratulations to WVUE-TV for its eight-month rolling investigation and its stick-to-it attitude, which resulted in even bigger stories as the station continued to dig.

CONGRATULATIONS!!