Categories: OLD Media Moves

Story on GM health care costs wins Golden Wheel Award

The Detroit Press Club Foundation presented its 2007 Wheel Awards for excellence in automotive in journalism at the Automotive Hall of FameÂ ThursdayÂ evening, and theÂ top honor, the Golden Wheel Award, went to reporter Ron French of The Detroit News for his series “The General and The Beast” on health care costs at General Motors Corp.

According to the judges at the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, led by Senior Assistant Dean Richard Roth, “This exhaustive examination of health care systems not only showed us GM’s prodigious problems, but also the problems — including nothing less than world economic competitiveness — that all the rest of us in the United States face or could face . . . This series, in a word, is terrific. It should be required reading for anyone running for president.”

The series also won first place in the “Newspaper News Story or Subject- Related Series” category. Earlier this year, it won first place in the “Newspaper Reporting” category in the Michigan Excellence in Journalism Competition, also sponsored by the DPCF.

Read about other 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.