ProPublica wins Scripps-Howard award for business journalism

Paul Kiel and Olga Pierce of ProPublica have been named the winners of $10,000 and the William Brewster Styles Award, which goes to the best business reporting story, from the Scripps Howard Foundation for exposing the crushing failure of industry and government responses to the foreclosure crisis.

ProPublica created an unrivaled database of homeowners who have faced foreclosure, opened a Facebook page to encourage homeowners to share their stories, wrote profiles of some of them, and incorporated their experiences into our reporting. It also provided a comprehensive rundown of the numbers behind the crisis.

Finalists in the business reporting category were Kevin G. Hall, McClatchy Newspapers, for “Financial Speculation in Commodity Markets;” and Donald Barlett, James Steele, Kat Aaron and Lynne Perri, Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, for “What Went Wrong: The Betrayal of the American Dream.”

In addition, Bloomberg News was a finalist for the Distinguished Service to the First Amendment award for “The Fed’s Trillion-Dollar Secret.” And Detroit News personal finance editor Brian O’Connor was a finalist in the commentary category for his personal finance columns.

Last year’s Styles Award winner was Paige St. John of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune for exposing the problems with the state’s property & casualty insurance market. St. John went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for the series.

See all of the Scripps Howard winners here.