WSJ reporters win WHCA award for coverage

Three Wall Street Journal reporters have won the Merriman Smith Memorial Award for Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure for Print from the White House Correspondents Association.

Alan Cullison, Rebecca Ballhaus and Dustin Volz won for their story, “Trump Repeatedly Pressed Ukraine to Investigate Biden’s Son.”

The judges wrote, “As described by the New York Times three months later, the Journal’s ‘explosive’ story was the final straw for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Within days the once-reluctant Pelosi initiated an impeachment investigation. The story illuminated what until then had been provocative but vague reports of a whistleblower’s complaint about a Trump call with a foreign leader.

“The Journal reporters wrote with context and sweep and made the implications clear from the start: Trump, the lede said, wanted Zelensky to work with Rudy Giuliani ‘on a probe that could hamper Mr. Trump’s potential 2020 opponent.’ The Journal’s relentless reporting broke new ground and gave the public information that the administration had tried to keep under wraps.”

See all of the 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.

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View Comments

Alfredo Santana says:
June 10, 2020 at 12:30 pm
Wow! I met Dustin Voltz the last week of February at an ASU Wall Street Journal workshop on business journalism in downtown Phoenix. He talked about his role in the newspaper, the big story he co-wrote, and his cyber-security and intelligence beat. He graduated with a B.A. in Media and Journalism from Arizona State. He compared Reuters' practice of sending lots of news bits until a big story is ready compared to Bloomberg. He worked for Reuters before joining the Journal.