Mary Judice Finney, a business reporter at the New Orleans Times-Picayune for 30 years, died Wednesday at the age of 73.
John Pipe writes, “The energy crisis of 1979 hit shortly after she started writing about the oil and gas industry. She kept busy writing front-page stories about developments in that vital sector of the state’s economy and about ways to use energy wisely.
“Finney, a former president of the National Association of Petroleum Writers, was part of The Times-Picayune’s team that won the 1989 Frank Allen Award – the highest writing honor from the Louisiana-Mississippi Associated Press Association – for coverage of a deadly explosion at the Shell Oil Co. refinery in Norco.
“She also was part of the newspaper’s team that won two Pulitzer Prizes in 2006 for coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. She left the newspaper in 2007.”
