Reuters has been named a finalist for four Gerald Loeb Awards, presented by UCLA's Anderson School of Management. The awards honor distinguished business and financial journalism in the United States.
'Ambushed at Home,' by Joshua Schneyer, Michael Pell, Andrea Januta and Deborah Nelson, is a finalist in the Investigative category. The series took readers inside restricted-access U.S. military bases to reveal squalid housing where thousands of families battled environmental health and safety hazards like toxic lead, rampant mold, collapsing ceilings and pest infestations.
'Powder Keg,' by Lisa Girion, is also a finalist in the Investigative category, for revealing that Johnson & Johnson talc for Baby Powder occasionally tested positive for small amounts of asbestos from the 1970s into the early 2000s. But also, as Girion discovered, J&J executives, mine managers and scientists knew about the problem, and while internally fretting over what to do about it to protect a company "sacred cow," kept it from regulators and the public and sought to sway U.S. regulators as they considered limiting asbestos in cosmetic talc products.
In the International Category, Steve Stecklow is a finalist for 'Hatebook,' which revealed how Facebook, in the years leading up to the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in Myanmar, devoted scant resources to rooting out hate speech. Almost a year after the army crackdown, Reuters discovered more than 1,000 examples of violent or pornographic posts and comments attacking the Rohingya and other Muslims on the social media platform.
The interactive graphic, '10 Years On,' by Noah Barkin, Jennifer Hughes, Howard Schneider, Karolina Tagaris, Weiyi Cai, Adam Wiesen, Michael Ovaska, Lea Desrayand, Gustavo Cabrera and Christian Inton, is a finalist in the Visual Storytelling category. To determine the key data-points and metrics on exactly what has changed since the 2008 financial crisis and possible trends moving forward, Reuters tapped five veteran reporters and editors who covered the crisis then and continue to cover these areas now. Working in the theme of a "reporter's notebook," these five journalists curated a series of data-driven charts and visualizations that drive to the heart of the crisis's meaning and continued impact.
Winners of the Loeb Awards will be announced in June. The full list of finalists is available here.
[Reuters Press Blog]
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