BuzzFeed biz reporters win award for labor reporting

BuzzFeed business editor Tom Gara sent out the following announcement on Monday:

Hello all,

Please give a warm round of props to Sapna Maheshwari and Cora Lewis, who have won the Newswomen’s Club of New York 2015 Front Page Award for their reporting on labor practices in the retail industry.

Their feature story, Making Victoria’s Secret Pay For Keeping Staff On Call, took a deep dive into on-call scheduling, an abusive labor practice that has become mainstream in the retail industry. Getting half a million people to read a 3,000 word labor/retail story is a high degree of difficulty task, which they pulled off thanks to great reporting and lively writing. Less than a month after publishing the story, Victoria’s Secret ended on-call scheduling in its stores, a development that Sapna also scooped.

Sapna is a magical and irreplaceable presence in the BuzzFeed newsroom, as you all know. She’s also a first-rate reporter, and this award recognizes that.

And Cora, who is kicking ass after just a few months as a labor reporter, has managed to win an award for a story published about seven weeks after her fist day at BuzzFeed.

What a pair! Please applaud them accordingly.