Congratulations to forensic journalist Neil Chenoweth and his colleagues on their 2008 Walkley Award for Business Journalism: an investigation into the failed stockbrokers Opes Prime.

I interviewed Chenoweth in 2002 for a Masters paper on Rupert Murdoch’s negotiation strategies.  During our talk, Chenoweth gave me a couple of “aha!” moments on how to conduct a forensic journalism investigation, Murdoch’s use of game theory to understand other parties in a deal, and the murky underworld of cable and satellite television.

Chenoweth writes regularly for the Australian Financial Review, an Antipodean equivalent of the pre-Murdoch Wall Street Journal.  Chenoweth’s Virtual Murdoch: Reality Wars on the Information Superhighway (Secker & Warburg, London, 2001), published in the US with new material as Rupert Murdoch (Random House, New York, 2004) chronicles his decade-long investigation into the world’s most powerful media mogul.  Read a chapter-by-chapter summary here.  Chenoweth’s book Packer’s Lunch (Random House, Sydney, 2006), reviewed here, also has substantial research on Sydney’s corporate dealmakers in the 1990s and their Swiss bank accounts.