We won an award!
One question we heard a few times when we started MATTER was whether we were really doing something new. Wasn’t there already lots of the sort of deep, investigative reporting about science and technology we champion?
That was answered emphatically last night, as Anil Ananthaswamy walked away with the prize for Best Investigative Journalism at the Association of British Science Writers’ awards for our launch story, Do No Harm.
We are tremendously proud of Anil’s work, of course, and the effort that the rest of the team put in to get this piece out there. The story of a man who wants to amputate his own leg was always going to be risky, but in the end we produced something that explored a difficult subject in a brilliant and sympathetic way.
What makes this award even more gratifying, however,was the way it won.
The judges didn’t even come up with a shortlist; they simply awarded Anil the prize outright because Do No Harm was “head and shoulders above the rest”. That’s something to be seriously proud of.
Winning awards is always a funny thing. They’re often a distraction, and especially in journalism they become a target for people sometimes at the expense of actually producing work people want to read (hello, Pulitzers).
But still, as a young publisher trying to push the boundaries and experiment where bigger, older organisations fear to tread, we’ll take this moment and revel in it. The ABSWs are the oldest science journalism awards in the world, and while they have moved with the times it still feels unusual for a small digital outfit such as ourselves to break ground so quickly.
Congratulations, team. Now let’s get back to work.
You can read Do No Harm for free here on Medium.
If you want to read more stories like it, you can become a MATTER member for just $0.99 per month. Members receive everything we publish, as well as exclusive benefits like audio versions of our stories,e-books, invites to Q&As with our authors and the chance to shape the topics we cover.
