Pulitzer, IRE Recognize Best in Business
Published: Tuesday, April 05, 2005
AIM THIS PAGE
Business reporters stood tall in the mix of winners of high-profile journalism awards announced this week.
The Pulitzer Board and Investigative Reporters & Editors found more than a dozen business stories worthy as winners or finalists for their coveted awards this year.
Wall Street Journal writers Amy Dockser Marcus and Joe Morgenstern each picked up a Pulitzer Prize, the former for Beat Reporting in health care issues and the latter for new film reviews last year.
The other publication to see its business desk well represented is The New York Times, whose financial investigative editor Walt Bogdanich won for his stories about the corporate cover-up of responsibility for fatal accidents at railway crossings. The same pieces, called “Death on the Tracks,” won Bogdanich IRE’s award in the largest newspaper category.
Diana Henriques, a financial investigative reporter at The Times and a speaker at Reynolds Center at API Investigative Business Journalism workshops, was named a finalist in the Pulitzer’s Investigative Reporting and IRE’s largest newspaper categories for her stories on some financial companies exploiting members of the military in insurance scams.
In IRE’s contest, business stories earned top honors in the group’s online and student work categories, as well as its special Tom Renner Award. The Center for Public Integrity’s study of more than 2.2 million Pentagon contract actions in the past six years, showing that more than 40 percent were no-bid contracts, won the online certificate. Students from the University of California, Berkeley, scored a certificate for their profile of a migrant worker who died in the Arizona desert on his way to find work.
Two reporters from the Chicago Sun-Times took home the Tom Renner medal for their report, “Clout on Wheels,” which investigated the city’s millions of dollars spent on inefficient dump trucks owned by mob families.
Beyond the winners, eight business reports fell into the finalist spots for largest newspaper, large newspaper, medium newspaper, weekly newspaper, national syndicate network, broadcast below top 20 markets, magazine/specialty, student work, online and book categories. Finalists hailed from the Los Angeles Times to Newsday to Bloomberg Markets to WTVF-Nashville, and included award-winning business journalists Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, also a speaker at Reynolds Center at API Investigative Business Journalism workshops.
Vandana Sinha is the Reynolds Center’s Project Manager and Associate Web Editor. She is a former business reporter for The Virginian-Pilot and an associate editor and reporter for The Washington Post Co.'s technology magazines.
