Good evening everybody. I'm Ian Hislop. I'm head of content at Private Eye.

My job is to separate the editorial and the advertising functions at Private Eye.

So I'd like to start by saying thank you very much to HSPZ for sponsoring this evening. I should point out they've got a very good deal going on

at the moment with their Swiss Saber accounts and they're offering zero interest, but only from Daily Telegraph journalists.

This is the 2014 Paul Foot Awards, an institution which celebrates investigative and campaigning

journalism.

The award was set up 10 years ago by Private Eye and The Guardian in memory of the campaigning journalist

Paul Foote, who died in 2004.

Over the last 10 years, the award has been won by journalists who worked on stories about gangs, corruption, phone hacking and numerous other stories which might never have come to light were it not for the attention to press through on them. Here's Ian Hislop on Paul Foote himself.

Footy was one of the great campaigning and investigative journalists ever, I think.

I'm bound to say that because he worked at eye but he also worked at the mirror and at the guardian

And he was an extraordinary colleague friend and I think inspiration. I mean it's ten years we've been doing these awards and still the stories he worked

on originally keep turning up again and again arms dealing corruption in Saudi Arabia

PFI police corruption they're all things that Foote was obsessed

by when he worked as a journalist and there's still things that journalists have to cover.

They're excited by the kind of stories that you're still getting in after 10 years of the foot award.

Every year it seems to me that we imagine, well you know there's been a chilling effect on journalism

this year there's been some new hurdle and no one will really want to do anything.

And then I look at the entries and I think, what was I getting depressed about?

They are extraordinarily diverse, interesting, and I think sort of high quality.

But no death knell for investigative journalism yet.

No, if you look across, no, there's no death knell for investing in journalism. If you look across the field, there's no death now for investing journalism.

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