Wall Street Journal wins award for backdating coverage

The Wall Street Journal’s coverage of backdating stock options was named Wednesday as the first place winner of the inaugural Philip Meyer Awards.

In addition, Gannett News Service was recognized for its analysis that rated hospitals on care for heart-attack patients, and a Philadelphia Inquirer investigation of a cheating scandal in New Jersey schools completed the winners list.

The Meyer Awards recognize the best uses of social science methods in journalism. The awards will be presented on March 9 in Cleveland at the 2007 CAR Conference, sponsored by Investigative Reporters and Editors. The first-place winner will receive $500; second and third will receive $300 and $200.

The awards are administered by the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (a joint program of Investigative Reporters and Editors and the Missouri School of Journalism), and the Knight Chair in Journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

The awards are in honor of Meyer, the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Meyer is the author of “Precision Journalism,” the seminal 1973 book (and subsequent editions) that encouraged journalists to incorporate social science methods in the pursuit of better journalism. As a reporter, he also pioneered using survey research for Knight-Ridder newspapers while exploring the causes of race riots in the 1960s.

The Journal’s “Perfect Payday” was a series of articles over the past year that exposed the widespread practice of secretly backdating stock option grants to benefit corporate insiders. Lead writers Charles Forelle and James Bandler used a statistical model to calculate the wildly improbable odds that options grant dates would just happen to be so favorably profitable to dozens of executives at some of the nation’s best-known companies.

Their stories about the scandal have spurred an ongoing federal securities investigation into rigged options at more than 100 companies to date.

Read about the other winners here.