Business
Public Integrity and Partners Win Multiple Business Reporting Awards – Center for Public Integrity
The Center for Public Integrity won four business journalism awards Thursday for investigations reported in collaboration with other newsrooms.
The judges of the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing (SABEW) Best in Business Awards selected the winners from a “record” 1,182 entries submitted by 193 news organizations.
Public Integrity winning projects:
Attacked behind the wheel. The project, in association with Scripps News, won its division in the Travel/Transportation category. The months-long investigation revealed widespread abuse in the trucking industry: Many female drivers reported being raped and assaulted by their colleagues and instructors while on the road as part of a training program partially subsidized by the US government.
The coverage was already having an impact before the project was released on December 11th. In response to our findings, a California law enforcement agency said it had launched an investigation into the sexual assault reported by one of the women interviewed.
The SABEW judges wrote that the investigation “addresses an important story of human interest and a business issue. The entry stands out from the whole package because it brings to life the plight of women truckers who work in an often hostile environment.”
Read the story and watch the documentary here.
danger zone. This series on climate shift in collaboration with Columbia Journalism Investigations and Type Investigations won their division in the Energy/Natural Resources category. The project revealed that the federal government has known for years that worsening climate impacts are driving millions of Americans from their homes, but officials have taken no steps to help effectively.
The research showed that weak policies that neglect vulnerable communities have left residents – often people of color – in increasingly dangerous conditions.
“As the entry has shown,” the judges wrote, “the government bureaucracy is completely unprepared for the flood of people who will need help to uproot their lives and relocate.” The entry provided new insights and compelling first-hand accounts.”
Read the series here. A collaboration involving reporters from local and regional newsrooms across the country produced powerful articles about the impact in their communities.
unequal load. Public Integrity has partnered with ICT, formerly Indian Country Today, to co-report on this series about states that use their taxes to exacerbate inequality, rather than reduce it. The series won its division in the explanatory category of SABEW; The judges said the “breadth of coverage was impressive”.
The stories showed how states siphon off a larger share of the income of poor residents than wealthier people and how self-confessed white supremacists set this in motion, how four decades of federal tax cuts help explain spiraling inequality, and how states undermine tribes by Tax activities on tribal lands.
“We’re asking people to fund government programs even if they can’t afford basic needs like food and shelter,” Ariel Jurow Kleiman of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles told us when we reported on the series. “That strikes me as deeply unfair.”
The Wealth Vortex. This podcast and series of text stories in partnership with Transmitter Media followed Iowa entrepreneur ReShonda Young as she attempts to open her state’s only black-owned bank — an exploration of what one person can and cannot do about the entrenched racial disparities in wealth in this country.
It won its division in SABEW’s Podcast/Audio category.
“This podcast series took a single idea and developed it like a great, long magazine story,” the judges wrote.
The series also received an honorable mention in its division in the banking/finance category. Those judges wrote, “This post is powerful and raises profound questions about our society.”
You can find the series here. It was formerly a finalist at the Ambie Awards, often referred to as the Oscars of podcasting. was a silver award winner at the Signal Awards; and took second place in this year’s Shafler Prize for Journalism.
