The newspaper’s series on the Community of Jesus and Thiago Bastos are honored
By Edward Miller
Oct 14, 2026
STURBRIDGE — The Provincetown Independent won two Publick Occurrences Awards from the New England Newspaper and Press Association at its Fall Leadership Summit on Oct. 9. The award is the organization’s foremost prize for investigative journalism.
Staff reporter Jack Styler was honored for a series of seven articles about the Community of Jesus in Rock Harbor published between August 2025 and April 2026. Tyler Jager co-authored one article. The reporters “dug deep into this longtime controversial religious group,” the citation reads, “and worked hard to get many former ‘CoJ’ members to talk about how they were turned into forced labor as children, among other things.”
Tyler Jager, Chloe Budakian, Paul Benson, and Agata Storer were also honored for a series of five articles about the arrest and imprisonment of 27-year-old carpenter Thiago Bastos by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, efforts to secure his release, and the effects of his detention on his family. Those articles were published between July 2025 and February 2026.
“What is the human cost when ICE detains an undocumented immigrant who’s lived here since childhood, who’s hard-working and who’s supporting a family?” the award citation says. “An outstanding example of enterprise reporting. This is a well-told narrative with a strong focus on the lives of those involved.”
Nine Publick Occurrences Awards were given this year to weekly newspapers. The Independent and Seven Days in Burlington, Vt. were the only papers to receive more than one.
Styler was also one of just three Massachusetts recipients of the A-Mark Award for investigative reporting, given by the press association and sponsored by the A-Mark Foundation.
The Independent also won a Distinguished Newspaper Award in the association’s Newspaper of the Year competition for small-circulation weeklies. This year’s winner in that category was the Martha’s Vineyard Times.
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