02/09/2026
Congratulations to Will Fitzgibbon and Peter Goodman for winning the 2026 Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting. Their series, “The Poisonous Lead Trade,” a collaboration between The Examination and The New York Times, takes readers from the polluting factories in a Nigerian town to major car companies to show how the actions in automotive boardrooms sickened children and workers an ocean away. Their work had immediate impact, leading a major battery maker to tighten its supplier rules and Nigerian officials to launch a testing program.
“ The Poisonous Lead Trade ” series exposes one of the dirtiest secrets of the automobile industry: Recycling lead for car batteries is poisoning people in Africa. Here, laborers work in a sort of bucket brigade to load batteries for delivery to the factories. Photo by Finbarr O'Reilly for The N...