SABEW names Best in Business winners

The Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing announced Thursday the 147 recipients of its 29th annual Best in Business Awards, honoring excellence in business journalism from 2023.

The Best in Business Awards attracted 1,103 entries from 181 news organizations, ranging from international, national and regional news outlets to specialized business publications. Thank you to all the judges.

“This year’s Best in Business Awards once again showcased entry after entry of absolutely stellar work,” said Joanna Ossinger, co-chair of the Best in Business Awards and markets editor at Bloomberg News, and Scott Wenger, Best in Business Awards co-chair and chief content officer at VolpeMiller. “Every year, this contest gets more and more competitive. SABEW is pleased to honor some of the most exceptional of those efforts.”

Among the many exceptional winners:

• A collaboration of International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, OCCRP and Paper Trail Media, winner in the Banking/Finance category, large division, for telling the story of how Russian kleptocrats laundered money through nominally democratic nations, setting a new bar for international investigative reporting.
• The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, winner of the Breaking News award in the medium division, for a superb package of stories covering Nippon Steel’s bid to take over U.S. Steel, providing essential context as well as local and national political implications.
• Time’s Alana Semuels, winner of Best Range of Work in the medium division, for her compelling range as a reporter and writer, brilliantly tackling topics as diverse as Walmart, security guards, job hunting, solar panels and remote work.
• Endpoints News, winner of the General Excellence award in the industry/topic-specific publications division, for its smart, comprehensive and innovative coverage of the biotech industry.

Individual journalists were recognized for their exceptional coverage in SABEW’s Best Range of Work award, where they submitted work across the broad spectrum of content platforms and categories. Winners included Josh Eidelson, Laura Bejder Jensen and Jo Constant from Bloomberg News, Alana Semuels from Time, and Jake Bittle from Grist.

Highlights include:

• The top four winners capturing the most overall awards include The New York Times (nine total; six winners and three honorable mentions), The Wall Street Journal (eight total; four winners and four honorable mentions), The Information (seven total; five winners and two honorable mentions); Bloomberg News (seven total; three winners and four honorable mentions), The Washington Post (seven total; one winner and six honorable mentions), STAT (five total; three winners and two honorable mentions), Bloomberg Businessweek (five total; one winner and four honorable mentions) and Capital & Main (five total; zero winners and five honorable mentions).
• General Excellence award winners include Endpoints News (Industry/Topic Specific category), Bloomberg (large category), STAT (medium category) and Crain’s New York Business (small category).
• Small-sized newsrooms that won in multiple categories include The Information, with five wins. The Examination and Rest of World each had two wins.
• Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication won top student journalism honors. John Leos, Keetra Bippus and TJ L’Heureux of Cronkite News, the news division of Arizona PBS at ASU, won the Student Journalism award for Stories for Student Media Outlets for “Soured on sugar: Haitian workers fuel Dominican sugar industry, at great cost.”
• Elizabeth Guevara, a Southern Methodist University student at the Meadows School of the Arts’ Division of Journalism, won the Student Journalism-Stories for Professional Media Outlets category for her work with The Dallas Morning News.

View the complete list of 2023 BIB honorees. View the judges’ comments for each entry.