B&S silver winner selected for “Best in Business Writing 2012″

A screenshot from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel series "A Case of Shattered Trust."

A story by Raquel Rutledge and Rick Barrett that won the Barlett & Steele Silver Award for 2011 has been selected to be part of the “Best Business Writing 2012,” a book to be published in June by Columbia University Press.

Rutledge and Barrett, reporters at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, received the silver award in the 2011 Barlett & Steele Awards for Investigative Business Journalism for their series “A Case of Shattered Trust.”

Details in their own words about of their investigation into one of the nation’s largest manufacturers of alcohol wipes describing filthy conditions at the plant nearby are in this behind-the-story account.

Dean Starkman, editor of the Columbia Journalism Review’s The Audit and one of four editors for the Best in Business book, said this about the collection of business writing:

“The Best Business Writing 2012,” is as the name implies, the first of what we’re hoping to be an annual series that collects, well, the best. We want these books to highlight great journalism about business (and finance and
the economy) in all its diversity: from muckraking exposes (like this one) to classic corporate profiles, economics writing, business columns, blog posts, whatever. The publication or medium really doesn’t matter.

We’re now at work collecting — and soliciting — candidates for “BBW2013″. If you-all do, or see, anything we should know about, send me a note.”

Starkman’s co-editors in “The Best Business Writing 2012″ are Martha Hamilton, Ryan Chittum and Felix Salmon.