In the business and finance world, largely dominated by men, Mexican journalist Isabella Cota has had to learn to deal with the discomfort of being the only woman in the room. Especially as a woman who asks questions.
That’s why being selected as a winner of the 2025 Maria Moors Cabot Prizes, alongside three women whose journalism has challenged those in power, carries special meaning.
“Powerful men hate being questioned by women. You have to learn to withstand the tension and endure the discomfort,” Cota told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR). “You learn. It’s like a muscle, you work it and with practice it affects you less and makes you a better journalist.”
For only the second time in the 86-year history of the prizes, all four winners are women. Alongside Cota, this year’s Cabot Gold Medal recipients are journalist Nora Gámez Torres of the Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald (United States); Omaya Sosa Pascual of the Center for Investigative Journalism (Puerto Rico); and Natalia Viana of Agência Pública (Brazil).
“To be in this same league with these other three women is a tremendous honor for me,” Cota said. “The winners of this award have been the journalists I have admired most in my career, so reaching this position filled me with disbelief.”
The Cabot Prizes honor journalists and news organizations from the United States and Latin America for professional excellence and coverage that promotes inter-American understanding, according to Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, which hosts the awards.
For Cota, that understanding between countries of the continent has been at the center of her work through stories about how the financial decisions of governments and powerful elites affect people’s lives.
“These things define so much of the day-to-day lives of citizens, and citizens obviously are not aware of it,” she said. “It is the forces of the markets and governments that decide many things in citizens’ lives.”
The Cabot Jury highlighted Cota’s ability to give ordinary people a perspective on how economic policies affect them.
“Her insightful business and financial journalism, which seeks to hold governments accountable, is especially valuable amid the drastic changes in economic policies that are transforming the Americas,” the Jury said in a statement.
It was September 2008 when Cota was beginning the first year of her master’s degree in Journalism and Globalization as part of an Erasmus Mundus program in Europe. She had chosen a specialization in theoretical studies on the public sphere in Hamburg, Germany. However, in her first month of classes, U.S. investment firm Lehman Brothers collapsed, considered the biggest symptom of the global financial crisis that erupted that year.
In her first book, Cota explains the consequences of former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador's economic policy. (Photo: Penguin Random House)
Cota saw how the world changed. She knew that if she wanted to be competitive in her profession, she needed to learn how to understand what was happening in global finance.
“It was really such a drastic change that I paused and said, ‘The world in which I chose the most philosophical, most academic specialization is no longer going to exist.’ I realized it very quickly,” she remembered.
The journalist decided to switch to the specialization in financial and business journalism at City University in London. Although she had never been attracted to economics, that year she understood that the financial system had implications for people’s lives, and that was where she decided to focus her professional work, she said.
Since then, she has worked for outlets such as Reuters, as a correspondent in Costa Rica; Bloomberg, covering Central America, the Caribbean, and Mexico; and El País, as an economics correspondent in Latin America.
Along the way, she discovered that financial news was aimed at a very specific and closed niche, and that many sectors of the population were excluded from this information.
“When you put economic journalism in a separate drawer, you are excluding a lot of people from the knowledge you generate. What I like is showing citizens how the business interests of a handful of actors define a large part of their daily lives,” she said. “This can be in the form of corruption, abusive monopolistic practices, or invisible financing of civil organizations, for example.”
Last year, Cota published her first book, Luck or Disaster: Chance as Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Economic Model, in which she explains with hard data and everyday anecdotes the consequences of the economic policy of the former Mexican president.
Since September 2024, Cota has been a reporter and Latin America coordinator at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), positions she considers a “graduation” in her nearly 20-year career, during which she has been able to fully devote herself to the type of investigative journalism that interests her.
The ICIJ is a global network of investigative reporters who collaborate to expose cross-border crimes, corruption, and abuse of power. It has coordinated the largest cross-border journalism projects in history, including the Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Pandora Papers, Offshore Leaks, and FinCEN Files.
“Something that ICIJ keeps very present in its global investigations is bringing down full stories, whether financial, economic, especially business-related,” she said. “It is a challenge to simplify without sacrificing, and doing it at the level we do at ICIJ has also been very important to me. I have developed it even more.”
Cota says the work that most links her to the journalism of the other three Cabot Prize winners this year is the report The Unknown Winners of Mexico’s Energy Reform, published in 2021 in El País.
This investigation, co-authored with journalist Adam Williams, revealed ties between executives of Mexico’s Federal Electricity Commission and Whitewater Midstream, a U.S. company that obtained multimillion-dollar contracts during the government of former Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.
“I see that the rest of the awardees have had similar investigations aimed at exposing the economic interests of private actors and the way they interact with, or perhaps even corrupt, the public sector,” Cota said.
From Cota’s perspective, most media outlets specializing in business and economics on the continent have that exclusionary focus that leaves out the human consequences of elites’ decisions.
In Latin America, she said there are independent outlets that, without being specialized, have investigative journalists on their teams who cover economic and financial issues very well. Among them she cited ICIJ’s partner journalism organizations such as Convoca in Peru; Ciper in Chile; Armando.info in Venezuela; and Connectas and CLIP, both with journalist networks across Latin America.
“Media outlets would benefit from grounding these topics more. However, very good journalism is being done in Latin America in this regard,” Cota said. “Many of our partners are investigative journalism units that, in my opinion, do a more complete job explaining business and financial issues that have to do with citizens’ daily lives.”
Cota and the other winners of the Cabot Gold Medal will be honored in a ceremony on October 8 at Columbia University in New York.
* Rosental Alves, director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, which publishes LatAm Journalism Review (LJR), is president of the Cabot Jury.
