Ithaca College

The nonprofit news organization Mother Jones has been named winner of the fifth annual Izzy Award, presented by the Park Center for Independent Media (PCIM). The outlet was honored for publishing “major, timely stories and investigations throughout 2012 that had significant public impact.”

Mother Jones journalists will receive the honor at the annual Izzy Award ceremony on campus, which will take place in April at a date and time to be announced.

Known for investigative journalism since its founding in 1976, Mother Jones — currently coedited by Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery — used its website and bimonthly print magazine to break national stories last year on issues ranging from the presidential election to mass shootings.

The Izzy Award is named after a legendary dissident as well, the muckraking journalist I. F. “Izzy” Stone, who exposed government deceit while championing civil liberties, racial justice and international diplomacy.

PCIM congratulates the fine journalists at Mother Jones for their persistence in bringing clarity to complex subjects and in shining light into the dark corners of American politics and society and for continuing the legacy of Izzy Stone. In a year full of excellent independent journalism, the judges had a difficult choice. Among Mother Jones’s achievements in 2012:

• Washington bureau chief David Corn reported extensively on presidential candidate Mitt Romney, releasing the “47%” undercover video and related stories.
• Senior editor Mark Follman and a reporting team compiled the definitive (and interactive) database on U.S. mass shootings over the last 30 years, with many supplementary articles. Their investigative work continues to inform the national debate over gun control.
• Reporter Andy Kroll and colleagues offered some of the best and most accessible coverage of “dark money,” the funding of candidates by secretive super-PACs and nonprofits. The reporting included crucial history — and pointed toward reform.

The previous winners of the Izzy Award are journalist Sharif Abdel Kouddous; the Center for Media and Democracy/“ALEC Exposed”; author/columnist Robert Scheer; New York City’s in-depth outlet City Limits; investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill; blogger Glenn Greenwald; and Democracy Now! host/executive producer Amy Goodman.

For more information, visit www.ithaca.edu/indy/izzy  or contact Jeff Cohen,  jcohen@ithaca.edu.