Yet another award for Wall Street Journal backdating series

The Wall Street Journal reporters who wrote the main stories about the backdating of stock options have won the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting from Harvard University, according to an Associated Press story.

The AP story stated, “The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University announced on Tuesday that Charles Forelle, James Bandler and Mark Maremont win the $25,000 prize. Their report resulted in the federal investigation of more than 130 companies and the firings of more than 60 business executives.

“‘This story had a huge impact on the business community, and its force is ongoing,’ Alex Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center, said in a statement.

“The other finalists for the prize were a team of Boston Globe reporters who investigated aggressive debt collectors; Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber of The Los Angeles Times for a report on failing transplant operations; Debbie Cenziper of The Miami Herald for uncovering financial mistakes at the Miami-Dade Housing Agency; a team of Seattle Times reporters who reported on hundreds of sealed court files; and a team of Washington Post writers who looked at failures in federal farm subsidy programs.”

Read more here.

The stories are also a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, and they won the National Headliner Award and the George K. Polk Award, as well as the inaugural Philip Meyer Award from the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting. See the details of those awards here.