2021 Izzy Award Winner: Truthout

The Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College has announced the recipients for this year's Izzy Award for “outstanding achievement in independent media”. One of these recipients is Truthout, a nonprofit independent news outlet. 

During 2020, Truthout launched the series “Despair and Disparity: The Uneven Burdens of Covid-19”. This series comprises 250 articles covering the political, economic, environmental and racial aspects of the pandemic. These articles included reporting by incarcerated people, mothers of prisoners who wrote about conditions within the prisons, and stories detailing the surge in overdoses during the pandemic. Truthout additionally published investigative pieces on COVID’s rapid spread throughout women’s prisons and COVID-driven prisoner uprisings. Other stories Truthout covered include the plight of Native Americans, the abandonment of homeless people amid COVID and how close quarters augmented the virus’s spread in ICE detention facilities. 

The presentation of these Izzy awards took place at the end of April. Maya Schenwar, editor-in-chief of Truthout, accepted the award at the presentation.