Cotton Capital

“I felt sick to my stomach,” wrote The Guardian’s editor-in-chief Katharine Viner in an editorial last March. She was recalling the day she met the historians commissioned by The Guardian’s owner, The Scott Trust, to look into the newspaper’s past, inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement. “The evidence was inescapable: there was no doubt that The Guardian was founded with money partly derived from slavery.”

In a breathtakingly honest mea culpa, The Guardian detailed the paper’s extensive links with slavery in its Legacies of Enslavement report, and set out a 10-year, £10m-plus programme of ‘restorative justice’.

Cotton Capital, an ambitious cross-platform series encompassing news articles, long-form essays, podcasts, video, a magazine, a 15-part newsletter and social media content, was an important part of its reparations. The series included a shocking feature on the backlash facing researchers seeking to examine historical links with slavery at prestigious universities, and a piece highlighting present-day discrimination in Manchester, which prompted mayor Andy Burnham to admit more must be done. Schools and universities have used the project in their teaching.

Judges called Cotton Capital “a hugely thoughtful and comprehensive project that provides a ground-breaking example of how an organisation addresses historical links to slavery.”