"Sold a Nightmare" series wins Polk Award for business reporting

North Carolina's Charlotte Observer won a George Polk Award for excellence in journalism for their series "Sold a Nightmare."
The series, written by reporters Binyamin Appelbaum, Lisa Hammersly Munn and Ted Mellnik showed how a homebuilder used certain practices to cash in on first-time homebuyers. Their series identified signs of the sub-prime lending crisis well before the topic dominated national media coverage.
In addition to receiving the Polk Award for business coverage, the series also received an honorable mention in the 2007 Barlett & Steele Awards for Investigative Business Journalism.
The Polk Awards honor George Polk, a reporter for the CBS television network who was killed while covering the Greek civil war.
Other winners included:
* The Wall Street Journal's Shai Oster received the environmental reporting award for a series of stories on China's $22 billion Three Gorges Dam project.
* John McPhee, a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1965, who won the George Polk Career Award.
* Chauncey W. Bailey Jr., an editor at the Oakland Post who was killed last year while reporting a story, was given the local reporting award.
For the full list read The Wall Street Journal story here.
To read about how the Charlotte Observer series was developed and reported click here.