NBR journalists Nicholas Pointon and Tim Hunter have picked up major prizes at the 2023 New Zealand Shareholders’ Association journalism awards, with Pointon also named the overall Business Journalist of the Year.
It’s the third successive year NBR has won the overall award, following Hunter’s win last year and senior journalist Maria Slade’s win the year before. Hunter also won the top gong in 2019.
Pointon is the youngest ever overall winner in the awards, which have been running since 2018. His win comes in a record year of about 100 entries.
This year’s awards were supported by Simplicity and the NZX, with Gyles Beckford, Jenni McManus, and James Hollings the three judges.
Pointon won the business features category for his investigation Validus: The multi-level marketing scheme coming for New Zealand. Since writing the story, Validus has been issued with a permanent stop order by the Financial Markets Authority, preventing it from operating in New Zealand.
Nicholas Pointon.
Validus, which targeted the country’s Tongan community, is also under investigation by the Commerce Commission.
NZX chief executive Mark Peterson said Pointon's feature "had it all", using a gripping opening and narrative frame which put the reader in the scene and allowed the writer to weave in substantial research.
"The way in which the writer moved beyond the traditional concerns of business journalism – the money – to include the inherent exploitative racism of this scam, its targeting of the Tongan community, and the ways in which institutions implicitly collude in it, was outstanding. It wasn’t just a long news story, it was a great piece of writing, built on substantial original research, informed by deep moral concern, to produce a piece that truly shifted the frame of what business writing can be."
Hunter, meanwhile, was joint winner in the business commentary category for his Hunter’s Corner column, Gilding the ivory towers, analysing the legitimacy of universities’ pleas of poverty and underfunding. He shared the award with former NBR journalist Jenny Ruth, while NBR co-editor Hamish McNicol was also a finalist in this category.
Tim Hunter.
NZ Shareholders’ Association chief executive Oliver Mander said the piece challenged the tin-cup rattling narrative the university sector's issues were all about getting more money from government.
"Through solid research into the state of universities’ financial position, he offered an alternative that the sector has a strong asset base and questioned how they manage their finances and future spending priorities."
The business news category was won by BusinessDesk’s Cécile Meier while emerging business journalist of the year went to BusinessDesk’s Ella Somers.
Mander said the country needed a strong business media as part of an ecosystem which creates transparency and holds leaders to account.
“New Zealand investment markets have a vested interest in ensuring that business journalism becomes relevant to the millions of KiwiSaver investors and hundreds of thousands of Sharesies investors across the country.”
