McKinsey & Co. book wins IRE award

A book about consulting firm McKinsey & Co. has won the Investigative and Reporters’ Book Award for 2022.

“When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm,” was written by multiple Pulitzer winner Walt Bogdanich and New York Times investigative reporter Michael Forsythe.

The judges commented:

Using tens of thousands of documents and hundreds of interviews, Bogdanich and Forsythe expose the many tentacles of consulting conglomerate McKinsey & Company. Before the journalists’ work, little was known about McKinsey’s clients that range from pharmaceutical companies to federal drug regulators to foreign governments. The dynamic storytelling kept us turning the page to find whose mess McKinsey was involved in next.

IRE, founded in 1975, is a nonprofit professional organization dedicated to training and supporting journalists who pursue investigative stories. IRE also operates the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, a joint program with the Missouri School of Journalism.

See all of the winners here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.