Campaign has been 'financially catastrophic', says Paul Foot Award winner

This year's winner of the Paul Foot Award for Campaigning Journalism says her End Child Detention Now campaign has been effective but 'financially catastrophic' for her.

Freelance journalist and author Clare Sambrook picked up the accolade at a ceremony held in the London BAFTA offices last night, in recognition for her investigating, reporting and campaigning against the detention of asylum seekers' children.

Speaking to Journalism.co.uk after winning the award, Sambrook said that despite the campaign's success, as a freelancer she has suffered financially.

"The scary problem for me is that although this campaign has been effective it has been financially catastrophic for me.

"It's very difficult as an investigative freelance to get paid for your work. The Mail on Sunday pays properly for investigative stuff but the Mail Group is not going to run a load of articles about the damage being done to asylum seeker children, that's just not their thing. So it is extraordinarily difficult to get any money out of the liberal press for investigative reporting".

In 2009, Sambrook helped run a press campaign for an asylum seeking family who had been split up and detained. Following their release, she co-founded her award-winning campaign.

"My friends and I decided that we just needed to stop this practice of detaining children and we rather crazily decided to launch a national campaign and it just took off in quite an astonishing way," she told Journalism.co.uk last night.

She went on to research and write investigative stories and comment articles on related issues which have been published by various outlets including openDemocracy, Private Eye, the Guardian and the Independent.

Sambrook also spoke about the difficulty of getting some of her work into the national press:

"It's been a real mix in terms of the response form the national press. Some of the investigative pieces that I have written about the Home Office ... and also the research I have done about detention companies, I couldn't get into the national press. I was very delighted that Anthony Barnett at openDemocracy ran those pieces, but they had been offered to the national press who didn't run them.

"On the other hand a lot of national newspaper journalists have used our material which we're delighted about, for example Robert Verkaik on the Independent got a whole page out of a quote that we had elicited from Paddington Bear, which may sound a bit daft in the context ... but of course that's the kind of coverage that really touches peoples' hearts and it's the mix of the really aggressive investigative reporting and the stuff that touches peoples' hearts that I think has made this campaign quite effective."

Sambrook has also been shortlisted for the 2010 Bevins Prize for outstanding investigative journalism.

Journalism.co.uk will have more from the Paul Foot Award 2010 soon, including an interview with the recipient of the special Lifetime Campaign Award, Eamonn McCann.

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