Make Your Mark: Nominate for the NYFWA Impact Award

The Honor

The New York Financial Writers’ Association created the Impact Award to honor a distinguished story or body of work by reporters whose work spurred change, irrespective of when the story or stories were published. The idea behind the honor is to elevate stories that have a demonstrable impact on the world, whether by spurring investigations, changing laws or holding the powerful to account.

These things do not happen overnight. It may take months, even years, before investigations happen, laws get changed or wrongdoers are held to account for facts brought to light by early and prescient reporting that puts an important issue on the public agenda. That is why we decided to eschew the traditional Jan. 1 – Dec. 31 eligibility criteria that accompanies most journalism award contests. For this honor, what matters most is the impact spurred by the reporting – not when it published.

For our inaugural Impact Award, given out in Sept. 2019, the NYFWA board honored Carrick Mollenkamp and Mark Whitehouse for their 2008 reports, published in the Wall Street Journal, which first demonstrated that the world’s most important interest rate benchmark, Libor, was becoming unreliable. The news stories helped expose a global interest-rate manipulation scandal that resulted in billions of fines levied against large banks and set in motion the demise of the Libor benchmark in 2021.