A Commpro News Update

Recently, The Society of American Business Editors and Writers announced their results of the 22nd annual Best in Business competition, which recognizes outstanding stories published or aired in 2016.

Leading the pack with 11 honors is Bloomberg News, Fortune earned seven, and The Wall Street Journal five. The Associated Press, Crain’s New York Business and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel all earned four honors apiece.  The 112 winners and honorable mentions represent all formats and corners of the world. One hundred seventy-five news organizations submitted 946 entries across 65 categories. 

SABEW overhauled the contest in 2016 to better reflect journalism’s digital focus. This year’s entries were judged almost entirely by subject matter.  To maintain fairness, news outlets competed against others of similar staff size.

“We're living in a golden age for business journalism," said SABEW President Cory Schouten. "The quality, depth, creativity and impact of this year's Best in Business entries were inspiring -- and our judges faced a very difficult task winnowing the field.”

Contest honorees will be celebrated Saturday, April 29, 2017, during the 54th annual SABEW conference at the Westin Seattle hotel. This year’s conference focuses on the future of business news in a program packed with big ideas and TED-style talks, hands-on skills development, face-to-face conversations with C-suite leaders, and member networking. Journalists will be able to take back to their newsrooms plenty of new skills and innovative ideas to share and use.

Eight pieces honored in this year’s contest were the result of news organizations coming together for partnership projects. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, along with the McClatchy Washington News Bureau and the Miami Herald, garnered two awards for its Panama Papers series. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel teamed with the website MedPage Today to expose drug companies that invent or inflate diseases in order to sell more prescriptions.

Numerous honored works exposed injustice. BuzzFeed’s investigation into Universal Health Services found that the nation's largest chain of psychiatric hospitals routinely admitted patients and held them against their will until their insurance ran out. Fortune won for its examination of the elements that enabled Volkswagen to perpetrate its fraud on millions of customers worldwide by tampering with auto emissions.

In a category for student journalists, Dalton LaFerney of the University of North Texas won for his expose of the “Frack Master,” a tech-company CEO who posed as an expert on hydraulic fracturing despite having little experience in the industry. Also, Athena Cao, Zebrina Edgerton-Maloy and Logan Hendrix of Washington and Lee University were honored for their group project on high-interest payday loans.