Azam Ahmed
The New York Times
The horrifying cycle of violence that afflicts so many Latin American countries is rendered with deeply felt humanity in Azam Ahmed’s five-part New York Times series, “Kill, or Be Killed: Latin America’s Homicide Crisis.” Ahmed explores the root causes of the many thousands of killings in the region every year. He moves beyond the numbers to paint memorable portraits: a brave Honduran pastor, a remorseful Mexican killer, a teenage Guatemalan mother. “Underpinning nearly every killing is a climate of impunity that, in some countries, leaves more than 95 percent of homicides unsolved,” Ahmed writes. “And the state is a guarantor of the phenomenon—governments hollowed out by corruption are either incapable or unwilling to apply the rule of law, enabling criminal networks to dictate the lives of millions.”
2020 Michael Kelly Award Finalists

Craig Whitlock
The Washington Post
With his five-part series, “The Afghanistan Papers,” Craig Whitlock has produced what already feels like a definitive survey of the U.S. government’s deceptive and complicit role in America’s longest armed conflict.

Tom Warren and Katie J.M. Baker
BuzzFeed News
In an exposé spanning six countries and supported by thousands of pages of documents and more than 100 interviews, Warren and Baker reveal the human cost of the World Wide Fund for Nature’s war on poaching.

Kyle Hopkins
Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica
In “Lawless,” Hopkins investigates local policing in a vast state that is also a “news desert”—a region that has little in the way of reliable local-news coverage.