New Journalism Prize to Award up to $10,000 for Original Investigative Reporting

A new competition on Substack for student and citizen journalists is offering up to $10,000 for independent, investigative projects.

The Shillman Journalism Prize, founded by award-winning reporters Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, aims to reward young journalists for in-depth, unbiased coverage, something that both said can be overlooked in today’s media environment.

“The mainstream media are biased, and their bias and activism are damaging America and the world,” McAleer said. “Too often mainstream journalists seem more interested in covering up the news than covering it. That has to change.”

The Right, he said, also places more emphasis on critiquing this bias than on making its own news stories.

“We’ve always felt that young conservatives think journalism is about opinion,” McAleer said.

“A lot of great opinion pieces come from news journalism,” McAleer added. “If we’re not in the news journalism world, we’re ceding ground to the Left. You need facts to write opinions. The Left is creating the facts, and we’re behind.”

McAleer and McElhinney themselves are husband-and-wife investigative reporters who gained notoriety for their coverage of abortion provider Kermit Gosnell and their undercover reporting on adoption and baby-purchasing rings in Romania.

“We’ve been locked out, slapped, shut down, threatened with a gun, kidnapped, and on more than one occasion I thought I was going to die,” McAleer said. “To be honest, we wouldn’t change a thing about our time as journalists. Well, apart from the time I actually thought I was going to be killed. … But I did get the story.”

While the pair joked that contestants need not go to such extremes for the Shillman competition, they said they want to share their same enthusiasm for journalism with a generation that has been so disillusioned by the profession.

“It doesn’t have to be a national story; it doesn’t even have to be a state story,” McAleer said. “If it’s a story that’s important to a town of 10,000 people, it says something about that town. It says something about the state of the world, and that’s the kind of story we want.”

McAleer quoted George Orwell’s definition of news as: “Something someone somewhere doesn’t want published.”

Contestants are encouraged to search publicly available documents and file Freedom of Information Act requests, but McAleer said many stories are easy to find if one only looks.

“Very often the facts are there,” McAleer said, “but it’s either been not reported, misreported, or censored.”

The Shillman Journalism Prize will award $10,000, $5,000, and $2,500 to the first-, second-, and third-place winners. The prize is made possible by a generous grant from Dr. and The Shillman Foundation.

Submissions are due Dec. 31 via PhelimMcAleer.Substack.com as a written article, audio story, or video documentary. Contestants must be either student or citizen journalists under the age of 25.

According to McAleer, 10 finalists will first be selected by a panel of experienced journalists, then the public will vote online on Substack.

More information on the Shillman Journalism Prize can be found on the Unreported Story Society website.

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