Media News

Bloomberg News wins IRE’s Meyer Award

January 21, 2025

Posted by Chris Roush

Bloomberg News has won the annual Philip Meyer Journalism Award from Investigative Reporters and Editors for “How Thousands of Middlemen Are Gaming the H-1B Program,” on exploitation of the U.S. specialty worker visa program.

The award recognizes the best use of social science research methods in journalism. This year, IRE honored five investigative projects from a pool of exceptionally strong applicants.

Winning projects will be recognized March 7 at the 2025 NICAR Conference in Minneapolis, during the Friday evening Philip Meyer Award Presentation.

The Bloomberg team was comprised of Eric Fan, Zachary Mider, Denise Lu and Marie Patino.

Judges’ comments: “Bloomberg News reporters found a handful of companies that learned to game the American H1-B visa program, which was intended to bring the world’s top talent to American businesses. Reporters leveraged machine learning and statistical analysis to cut through the 1.8 million applications, allowing them to document a story that would have been otherwise impossible. In one instance, reporters found a network of staffing firms linked to an Indian politician that applied for visas for the same people, and took a cut of their salaries when they won the lottery. The reporters used analysis of anomalies to lead them to an algorithm that eventually identified about 3,500 staffing firms registered under multiple names. In all, the effort allowed Bloomberg to document a system that had been previously known only as whispers in the IT community.”

Read more here.

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