Hazel Sheffield
Journalist
Hazel Sheffield is a British multimedia journalist. Her work can be found at the Guardian, the Times, the Financial Times, Wired, the Atlantic, Institutional Investor, The Economist, Vice, the BBC and the Columbia Journalism Review.
Hazel was the Fulbright Alistair Cooke scholar at Columbia Journalism School in New York, 2011-12, where she made a documentary about a record store that was bought by the BBC.
She was the business editor of the Independent until summer 2016, when she left to found farnearer.org. This grant-funded project documents self-organising communities and economic alternatives. In 2019, Far Nearer was highly commended in the Georgina Henry Award for Innovation at the Society Of Editors’ Press Awards. In 2021, Hazel returned to these communities for her newsletter series Revisiting Britain.
In winter 2018, Hazel was an IJP fellow on the politics desk of the Sächsische Zeitung in Dresden, Germany, covering migration and the rise of the far right. In 2019, Hazel worked with Huffington Post and the Bureau Local on an investigation into the thousands of parks, libraries, community centres and other spaces sold by councils. Sold From Under You included an interactive map. It was shortlisted at the 2019 Data Journalism Awards.
In 2020, Hazel co-ordinated a cross-border team investigating the impact of Europe’s renewable energy subsidies on Eastern Europe’s forests, with funding from IJ4EU. Money to Burn was published across 10 newsrooms including the Guardian, Die Zeit Online and Publico. The investigation has been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Sigma Data Awards, Covering Climate Now Awards and the IJ4EU Impact Award. It was highly commended in the innovation category at the 2021 European Press Prize. Hazel was shortlisted for environment and energy journalist of the year at the British Journalism Awards 2021.
Hazel regularly runs writing workshops and speaks at events, including Hacks Hackers London, Arena’s DataHarvest festival and IJ4EU’s Uncovered conference. In 2023, she was a European Journalism Fellow at the Freie Universität in Berlin, where she was working on a book about communities reimagining derelict land and buildings. She is proud to be a co-ordinator at Arena for Journalism, a non-profit that supports cross-border, collaborative journalism.