The Society of American Business Editors and Writers announced honorees in its 19th Best in Business competition, which honors excellence in business journalism across all news platforms.
The 150 honored works represent all corners of financial news, from the Albany (NY) Business Review to Fortune magazine and National Public Radio, from CNBC to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The Wall Street Journal.
Bloomberg News and its related media outlets, including Bloomberg Markets, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and Bloomberg TV, led with 13 honors; The New York Times had eight, Reuters had seven, American Banker had six, and the Los Angeles Times and ProPublica had five each.
“We congratulate the winners, and more broadly, contest entrants, for submissions that really highlighted the strength of American business reporting. With so many strong entries, picking a winner was a tough proposition for many judges,” said Kevin G. Hall, SABEW president and chief economics correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers.
For the first time, the contest singled out a winner in each category. “Based on feedback from members, we altered the contest this year to reduce the number of finalists in favor of a single winner in most categories,” Hall said. “This represents a big change for the organization, and we intend to engage the membership to determine whether we should continue down this road or modify the contest further.” The judges also chose to name one or two finalists in many categories, as warranted by the quality of entries.
Awards will be presented during ceremonies Saturday, March 29, at the Sheraton Phoenix Hotel, the closing event of SABEW’s 51th annual conference. The conference will be March 27-29 at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University in downtown Phoenix, and features headliners author Michael Lewis, Quartz editor-in-chief Kevin Delaney, and GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons.
More than 200 working journalists and academics served as judges, sifting through a record 1,123 entries from 181 news outlets across 72 categories. “I’d like to extend a special thank-you to all our volunteer judges, who gave hundreds of hours of their time to make this the best and highest-quality contest it could be,” said Joanna Ossinger of Bloomberg News, who served as judging coordinator. “We couldn’t have done it without them.”
The honored work reflected the challenges as well as the progress in the world economy in 2013. A sampling of winners included ProPublica’s investigation into continued problems in the payday lending industry, and GlobalPost’s series on the emergence of the newly democratic Myanmar, where child labor remains a critical issue. Several publications earned recognition for “why it happened reporting,” from the Detroit Free Press series on why Detroit went broke to the Globe and Mail’s examination of corporate and government oversight failures that led to the derailment of an oil train and resulting fire that killed 47 in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec.
