The sometimes costly process of discovering who will be your friends at a new school, who is good to do group work with and who is best to keep your distance from. The Folhinha team started from this experience, common to almost every child, to present to its readers.
The material, which explains in a simple and didactic way to children the main conflicts in the world today, is the winner of the 2025 Folha de Jornalismo Grand Prize, which is in its 33rd edition.
Published in August 2025, a few weeks after the tariff imposed by the United States against Brazil, the one in the newspaper’s children’s supplement compared Donald Trump’s conduct throughout this term with that of that colleague who picks up the ball at the playground and says “everyone will play my way or there will be no game”.
The Brics, which bring together Brazil and China, were presented as “a new little group in this big classroom that is the world” and which made the United States jealous. And the European Union is summarized as a group of 27 students who fought a lot in the past, but, after two world wars, “understood that they would be much stronger if they formed a single clique”.
The judging panel was formed by Alexandra Moraes, ombudsman of SheetLívia Marra, assistant editorial secretary, Luciana Pandolfi, HR director at Grupo Folha, as well as Priscilla Bacalhau and Juliano Spyer, columnists for the newspaper. For the evaluating group, the work highlights – with creativity – the importance of the newspaper finding “ways to prioritize full understanding without giving up depth”. In total, 547 works were entered for the award.
Created in 1993, the objective of the award is to encourage teams and stimulate the search for excellence in professional journalism. Prizes were also awarded for works in six other categories: Exclusive Reporting, Hot Coverage, Teaching, Audiovisual, Service and Editorial Initiative.
Author of the winning text, journalist Gabriel Justo says that one of the objectives of the supplement is to generate conversations between children and adults. “Taking a subject that is difficult and bringing it to the children’s universe.”
The process of creating Folhinha also involves the cartoonist and Silvia Rodrigues, responsible for laying out the pages. In the conversation between them, explains Justo, the idea of portraying the countries as students came up. In the first illustration that accompanies the report, they are all well-behaved in the classroom. In the following image, the mess and conflict are general.
If the objective of the text was to explain the importance of diplomacy, the edition subsequently brought work to explain to Folhinha’s readers what happens when this path does not work. Reporter Tiago Pechini writes the script for a comic book about the atomic bomb and the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.
Guilherme Genestreti, editor of Folhinha, says that there is no prohibited topic for the supplement, as long as the language is appropriate. “The child will have access to these topics anyway. If he turns on the television, if he is on the internet, he can hear his parents talking.”
Coverage of police operations in Rio wins two awards
The top of the cover Sheet last October 30 was occupied by the image of dozens of bodies lined up and stretched out on the ground. In the headline, the information that the number of deaths in and, as a result, became more lethal than the Carandiru massacre, in 1992, which left 111 dead.
The work of the newspaper team that investigated, reported and reflected on what happened in the episode, carried out by many hands, won the Folha 2025 Award, in the Hot Coverage category. In addition to journalists Bruna Fantti, Nicola Pamplona, Yuri Eiras, Aléxia Sousa and Fabio Victor, 24 other names, including reporters and editors, contributed.
Bruna Fantti, a reporter for the newspaper in Rio, remembers that, on the 28th, there were almost 12 hours of spaced-out shootings. Until that night, the total death toll . “We got there at 7am and only left at 8pm, when there was still gunfire.” The following day, after receiving a call from a source in the middle of the night, she was one of the first journalists to arrive when residents removed her from a forested area.
She was accompanied by photojournalist Eduardo Anizelli, who says that, at a certain point, a person decided to discover the bodies for some time. It was at this moment that he decided to raise a drone to try to estimate the number of deaths. The striking photo, which ended up appearing on the front page the following day, was .
“It was the most difficult coverage I’ve ever done,” says Anizelli, who has been with the newspaper for 18 years. “It was the first time I had to stop for 10 minutes to breathe, wait for the crying crisis to pass before editing the photos I would send to the newsroom.”
Yuri Eiras says that, even on the day of the operation, he began to better understand the scale of the episode from the scope and around the city, in reaction to the operation. “The penny didn’t drop right away.”
“It’s difficult to be proud of a type of coverage like this, because it’s heavy coverage, a type of news that we don’t want to share”, he says.
Fabio Victor, special reporter for Sheet who lives in São Paulo, was rushed to Rio. “In addition to the risks inherent in such coverage, there was the additional challenge of filtering misinformation to bring to light what really happened in those days”, he says.
Cotidiano Editor, Fábio Haddad highlights that one of the challenges in coverage like this involves the logistics of defining how many people will be needed for the task and that, as the proportion increased, his entire team was already focused on the episode.
Text about Faria Lima measuring ‘PCC risk’ wins Exclusive Report
At the end of August last year, it was targeting the PCC’s presence in the fuel sector, as well as the complex financial structure that was being used to move and hide illicit money. Two months earlier, special reporter Alexa Salomão anticipated that directors of banks and companies in the Avenida Faria Lima region, in São Paulo, . The text was awarded in the Exclusive Reporting category.
Alexa says that the topic was born during a lunch with investment fund managers, when, in the middle of the conversation, one asked the other how he was going about pricing the shares of a certain company due to its probable link with the PCC. “The text anticipates this perception that the formal Brazilian economy is at risk”, says the reporter.
Still in the area of economics, the winner in the Editorial Initiative category was special reporter Idiana Tomazelli, with , who takes an in-depth look at how these entities are conducting their spending policies. “The series sheds important light for us to debate the issue of amendments, which is not only a federal problem, but also a state one”, says Idiana.
Economy took third prize in the Service category, with the interactive tool which allows the reader with the new rules approved by Congress. Prizes were awarded to assistant economics editor Luciana Lazarini, reporter Cristiane Gercina, Irapuan Campos, responsible for the calculator’s design, and Gustavo Goulart, who was in charge of programming the tool. The work also included a partnership with the consultancy Contabilizei. “There were several calculators available on the internet and we decided to create a more complete one, including the INSS discount”, says Luciana.
Ana Estela de Sousa Pinto, Editorial Secretary at Sheet and who until last year was an economics editor, says that each of the winning reports shows one of the editorial’s focuses, covering topics that make a difference in the reader’s daily life, such as the calculator, the critical look at public management, reflected in the series, and the monitoring of the private sector, which resulted in the report on Faria Lima.
Games and politics
In the Didacticism category, journalists Lucas Monteiro, Matheus Tupina and Vinícius Barboza were awarded awards, with a breath-taking report that shows, mostly close to conservative ideas. In the background is the growing ideological dispute in the digital environment. Vinícius says that the investigation was based on analysis and conversations with YouTubers who they themselves followed in the early 2010s and who at that time did not talk about politics.
“It was very interesting to see how radicalized these people were,” says Lucas. “It’s a predominance of right-wing people who are influencing new generations that follow YouTube.”
THE AWARD-WINNERS
GRAND PRIZE
Authors: Gabriel Justo, João Montanaro and Silvia Rodrigues
Co-author: Thiago Pecini
Publication date: 1.ago.25
EXCLUSIVE REPORT
Author: Alexa Solomon
Publication date: 28.jun.25
HOT COVERAGE
Authors: Bruna Fantti, Nicola Pamplona, Yuri Eiras, Aléxia Sousa and Fabio Victor
Co-authors: Francisco Lima Neto, Paulo Eduardo Dias, Tulio Kruse, Lucas Lacerda, Isabella Menon, Fábio Pescarini, Clayton Castelani, Bruno Lee, Bruno Benevides, Daniela Mercier, Aline Mazzo, Fábio Haddad, Leonardo Vieceli, Eduardo Anizelli, Raquel Lopes, André Fleury Moraes, Fernanda Mena, Cristina Camargo, Claudinei Queiroz, João Pedro Pitombo, Lola Ferreira, Jan Niklas, Juliana Coissi and Marcelo Toledo
Publication date: 29.out.25
TEACHING
Authors: Lucas Monteiro, Matheus Tupina and Vinícius Barboza
Publication date: 29.out.25
AUDIOVISUAL
Author: Eduardo Anizelli
Publication date: 30.out.25
SERVICE
Authors: Luciana Lazarini, Cristiane Gercina, Irapuan Campos and Gustavo Goulart
Co-author: Eduardo Cucolo
Publication date: 10.nov.25
EDITORIAL INITIATIVE
Author: Idiana Tomazelli
Co-author: Julianna Sofia
Publication date: 7.abr.25
