Media Award Plaques Missing

Some of the country’s top investigative reporters found themselves in the middle of a mystery yesterday afternoon.

They had gathered in Cambridge this week to mark the tenth anniversary of the Goldsmith Awards, a set of high-profile prizes given to journalists by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

Yesterday, the group of finalists in the investigative reporting category was set to receive plaques honoring their work.

Instead, they got a scoop they hadn’t counted on.

When Shorenstein Center Director Alex S. Jones stood up to present the honors at a luncheon ceremony at the Charles Hotel, he told them the box that contained their awards had disappeared.

Jones was left to wonder what had become of the prestigious prizes—and to do some investigative work of his own.

Two nights ago, finalists for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting gathered to learn which one of the six entries would take home the $25,000 prize. A pair of Seattle Times reporters won the award for an expose on a flawed cancer study.

The rest of the finalists—who had written on topics including terrorism, defects in Florida’s voting system and ties between the chocolate industry and modern-day slavery—were supposed to have their moment yesterday.

At the luncheon attendees dined on goat cheese salad, pasta primavera with shrimp and raspberry pie. They heard legendary Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward speak about the state of journalism after Sept. 11, and a little after 2 p.m. it was time for the finalists to receive their plaques.

That was when Jones made his startling announcement.

“They have disappeared,” he said of the awards.

Though he promised the finalists they would receive their prizes eventually—“you’ll get them,” he said—he told them the box containing their awards had vanished in transit between the Shorenstein Center’s offices at the Kennedy School of Government and the Charles Hotel, a few blocks away.

“Is this a joke?” someone yelled from the audience.

“I’m afraid not,” Jones replied.

And to the crowd of investigative reporters, he added, “We need your help.”

Though he still had not located the missing plaques late yesterday afternoon, Jones did pinpoint when and where the awards had slipped off the radar screen. In his attempt to track down the missing plaques, he watched tapes from the hotel’s security cameras.

“We know that [the plaques] got to the hotel because they have it on video,” he said. “After that, though, somebody must have misplaced them.”

An employee of the Charles, who would not give his name, said after examining the videotape he thought the box might well have been accidentally tossed aside.

“My best guess is that they have been thrown away,” he said.

If the plaques are not found by the end of the day today, Jones said, the Shorenstein Center will simply have new ones made up—the Center has plenty of extra blank certificates, he said.

Jones said he’s still not exactly sure how the boxes got lost in the shuffle and said he remains doubtful the precise circumstances surrounding the disappearance will ever be discovered.

“I don’t know if we’ll ever know what happened,” he said.

And for the time being, neither will the recipients. According to the reservations desk at the Charles, they all checked out yesterday afternoon.

—Staff writer Amit R. Paley contributed to the reporting of this story.