Post-Gazette wins national business journalism awards
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was among the top performers in the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing’s annual contest, earning two wins and three honorable mentions for stories written in 2023.
The winning stories, announced Thursday, ranged from breaking news coverage of the U.S. Steel acquisition, to the city of Pittsburgh’s massive holdings of abandoned homes, to problems with Century III Mall in West Mifflin. The PG was also recognized for its yearlong investigation into the massive recall of breathing machines manufactured in suburban Pittsburgh.
The 29th annual Best in Business Awards honored excellence in business journalism done around the world, and drew a total of 1,103 entries from 181 news outlets, according to the organization’s announcement.
“Every year, this contest gets more and more competitive. SABEW is pleased to honor some of the most exceptional of those efforts,” said Joanna Ossinger, cochair of the awards and markets editor at Bloomberg News, and Scott Wenger, awards co-chair and chief content officer at VolpeMiller.
The New York Times collected the most awards, with six winners and three honorable mentions, while the Wall Street Journal had four winning entries and four honorable mentions.
Other media outlets with strong showings were: The Information (five winners and two honorable mentions); Bloomberg News (three winners and four honorable mentions); The Washington Post (one winner and six honorable mentions); STAT (three winners and two honorable mentions); the PostGazette (two winners and three honorable mentions); Bloomberg Businessweek (one winner and four honorable mentions); and Capital & Main(five honorable mentions).
The Post-Gazette competed in the medium division, which included organizations such as the Boston Globe, ProPublica, Miami Herald, Philadelphia Inquirer and Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The Post-Gazette won in the Breaking News category for its coverage of the late December announcement that a Japanese steelmaker planned to pay nearly $15 billion to buy U.S. Steel, an iconic company with deep roots in Western Pennsylvania.
The judges said, “This deeply reported package of stories did a superb job of covering Nippon Steel’s bid to take over U.S. Steel,” adding that the team not only covered the basic facts but included valuable history, context, local color and political implications. Excellent graphics, including a timeline of the Pittsburgh company’s history, were also cited.
The Post-Gazette’s team included Evan Robinson-Johnson, Kris B. Mamula, Anya Litvak, Jonathan D. Salant, Ford Turner and Matt Rosenberg.
A package of stories headlined “Leftto Rot: The City of Pittsburgh’s Wasteland of Unsafe, Abandoned Homes,” won in the Real Estate category. Reporters Michael Korsh and Neena Hagen’s use of “impressive reporting, data analysis and data visualizations” were cited by the judges in honoring work that tracked the city’s ownership of morethan 13,000 homes.
Ms. Hagen also earned honorable mention in the Retail category for coverage of problems tied to the deteriorating Century III Mall and its out-of-town ownership.
Acollaboration between the PostGazette and ProPublica uncovering new information about defective ventilators and breathing machines that had been produced in Western Pennsylvania by Philips Respironics
and sold globally took honorable mention in two categories — Investigative and Health/Science.
Reporters Michael D. Sallah of the Post-Gazette and Debbie Cenziper of ProPublica led the “With Every Breath” project. Mr. Korsh contributed deep data analysis to the investigation. The team of reporters also included Mr. Robinson-Johnson, and Monica Sager and Margaret Fleming of Northwestern University.
“The reporting team went deep under the hood of Philips’s operations to illustrate both the internal debates and corporate decisions that eventually resulted in harm to patients,” the judges said. “The writing was crisp, purposeful and showed the despair people faced without being overly sensational. It’s an incredibly hard story to tell and the pieces are done well.”
Awards will be given out in midApril at SABEW’s annual conference at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications on Northwestern University’s downtown Chicago campus.