Headlinemoney Awards 2017

AWARDS 2017

Outstanding Achievement Award

Winner Stephanie Hawthorne

Now in its eighth year, Headlinemoney’s outstanding achievement award is bestowed on an individual in recognition of an exceptional contribution made by that person while working as part of the financial services media. This year’s recipient is award-winning financial journalist Stephanie Hawthorne, a household name amongst the UK’s pensions professionals having been, until April 2017, the longstanding editor of Pensions World, a title which she joined back in 1989. The subscription-based title closed this Spring having been a mainstay of the pensions press for 45 years enjoyed by pension managers, scheme trustees, corporate IFAs and employee benefits consultants. In an interview, Stephanie once said that on joining Pensions World she nearly never joined the company pension scheme because she never thought she was going to stay very long in an area regarded by many as a quiet backwater.

Of course, over the last 30 years or so this ‘quiet backwater’ has turned into one of the most exciting areas of all types of financial journalism with scandals such as Maxwell and Equitable Life to contend with, plus pensions mis-selling and not to mention the screeds of new pensions laws that have come into force. Whether it’s the political implications of the triple- lock, or the knock-on to a workforce when a major employer’s company pension suffers from a major event, pensions are never far nowadays from the general news headlines, let alone the ones which appear in specialist publications. Stephanie’s reporting on pensions has long been regarded as fair, insightful and balanced. The magazine she ran was regarded as one of the best of its type and for these reasons combined she wins Headlinemoney’s special annual award.

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