You’re Taking on the Best Reporters in the World

At the National Magazine Awards on Monday night, our team gathered… and to be honest, we were nervous as hell. As previously trailed, we had been nominated for a prestigious prize—the best reporting of the year, across the entirety of American magazine industry, and we were finalists in a field of seven, up against the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, … and ourselves.

The result? Ghost Boat didn’t win. But Matter did emerge victorious with our other story in the same category: our stunning investigation into the life and death of ebola expert Sheikh Humarr Khan.

Here’s a photo of those of us who were at the ceremony after the announcement: writers Elizabeth Weil, Eric Reidy and Clemantine Wamariya, former senior editor Michael Benoist, and current staffers Alana Hope Levinson, Mark Lotto, Bobbie Johnson, Erich Nagler, Noah Rabinowitz, Madison Kahn and Steven Levy. It was a fun night.

It’s a cliche to say that getting nominated is an honor, often deployed to hide disappointment. But in this case it really is true—especially when you realize what we were up against. No digital-only publication has ever won the reporting prize before (Matter is the first.) We are tiny and new compared to everybody else on the list of finalists: The combined institutional age of the rest of the field was 459 years—the wonderful folk at Mother Jones were our youngest rivals, at 40 years old. Matter on the other hand—a twisting, turning, undefinable thing—isn’t even four years old yet.

On top of this, we managed to get Ghost Boat, a sprawling, complicated, innovative, story that involved readers like you, a story without an ending, into the mix against some of the best reporters in the world.

So it’s still a victory, even if it’s not a straight out win. As our editor-in-chief Mark Lotto put it, you don’t get these prizes in isolation: “Every award is in some way an award for general excellence,” he said. “You can’t win a prize like this outside an organization of excellence, a culture of pushing harder, farther, always to be better.”

We’re proud of how much we’ve achieved, and of everyone who’s joined in this effort—even if we’re not all the way there yet. You should count yourselves winners too.

This Just In

Back to business. This morning a message dropped in our Slack channel from Gianni Cipriano. It’s one we’ve been waiting for for a long time.

Gianni’s tireless work with the Italian bureaucracy means that yep, finally, we’ve got the permission we need to interview convicted smuggler Measho Tesfamariam. We know that Measho may not give us everything we need—perhaps very little—but speaking directly to somebody who has been involved in the Ghost Boat mystery could help us unlock some pieces of the puzzle.

Logistics are now our biggest problem; we hope to conduct the interview in a couple of weeks.

At the same time, Mohamed is drilling into medical records and information in Libya, and we’ve used our time in New York to sketch out the next phase of the project. Again we’re up against bureaucracy, so expect fewer updates over the next couple of weeks as we start to get closer to the truth. But the pieces are pulling together.

Further Reading

Eric spoke to Warscapes, an independent online publisher focused on exposing the reality of conflict, for their podcast. You can listen here for his conversation with editor Jessica Rohan—it’s 20 minutes of conversation, and they get deep into some of the broader issues around the investigation and the broader context of the refugee crisis.

Here’s the podcast.

Although… perhaps crisis is not the way we should be describing this situation. At least, not for Europe. This slam in Foreign Policy explains exactly why “If you think Europe has a refugee crisis, you’re not looking hard enough.”

It’s highly illuminating to see how the countries worst hit by the movement of displaced people are not the big hitters who are debating how best to reject new faces.

Despite its small size and limited coffers, Jordan is being swamped by refugees, bearing the brunt of a double whammy from the Syrian civil war and the continuing conflict in Iraq. It was hosting some 685,000 internationally displaced people by mid-2015, a massive burden for a country with a population of 6.6 million. (Translate that fraction to the United States, and we’d be talking about more than 30 million refugees.) In fact, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports that Jordan is ranked second in the world for the number of refugees (90) per 1,000 inhabitants. The top country is Lebanon, with a staggering 209.

One last story—or set of stories, really—to get your teeth into: a daily diary of somebody who went and volunteered in Greece, brought to you by the people at impossible. Here’s a taster.

Humble, patient and desperate — it would have been emotionally overwhelming if I had any time to contemplate but instead I buddied up with Antonino from Crete and started building tents on the concrete for the families with the most or smallest children. Other families with babies sleeping or crying in their arms waited patiently for us to finish before we could help with theirs.

They promise to update the post with more.

For now, we carry on trying to find out where we can take this thing.

Onward.

Sent to our 1,675 followers.