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Barlett & Steele Award Recipients

The winners of the Barlett & Steele Awards demonstrate time and time again the importance of investigative business journalism in exposing corporate wrongdoing and protecting the vulnerable. Winning entries are chosen not only for their journalistic merit but the impact that ripples out from the publication of the investigation. All of these investigations have led to significant change, with many seeing legislative reforms, federal investigations, or major changes in business practices that ultimately benefit the lives of everyday people.

An investigation into a business, especially private for-profit corporations, often comes with major hurdles, including tight-lipped employees, a lack of available data, legal barriers, and working with limited resources. These hurdles force journalists to get creative in their methods and the solutions they come up with show the sheer determination and willpower they possess to tell the stories we don’t know, but should.

All of these winning journalists and publications continue the long-standing legacy of Don Barlett and Jim Steele.

View the annual winners or filter through individual winners below.

Global/National Publications

2025

Gold

$2 Million Dose

By: Robin Fields and David Armstrong

Through a series of interviews and digging through court filings and financial statements, this investigation demonstrates how a combination of nonexistent federal oversight and undisguised profit motives propel million-dollar price tags, not research funding nor manufacturing costs. It dismantles the age-old argument that astronomically high prices are an inevitable part of medical innovation.

Publication: ProPublica

Global/National Publications

2025

Silver

Health Care's Colossus

By: Bob Herman, Tara Bannow, Casey Ross, and Lizzy Lawrence

This sweeping investigation shows how UnitedHealth transformed healthcare by turning patients into monetizable products and doctors into puppets, all to maximize the company’s bottom line. While the company claimed that a bigger market share would empower it to drive down costs, the opposite happened. Owning clinics and contracting with the federal government via Medicare Advantage led to a reality where UnitedHealth’s insurance holders go to UnitedHealth doctors, keeping the money in the company.

Publication: STAT

Global/National Publications

2025

Bronze

Fentanyl Express

By: Maurice Tamman, Laura Gottesdiener, Stephen Eisenhammer, Drazen Jorgic, Daisy Chung, Kristina Cooke, Michael Martina, Antoni Slodkowski, Shannon Stapleton

Over five stories, this series exposes the ease of acquiring fentanyl “precursor” ingredients from Chinese sellers; how expanded de minimis trade rules made their shipments difficult to stop; how the Sinaloa cartel moves fentanyl through Mexico; and how the second Trump administration planned to stop the flow. Finally, the investigation brings the fentanyl crisis home to the U.S., where an increasingly available antidote is saving lives while extending addiction.

Publication: Reuters

Regional/Local Publications

2025

Gold

Burned

By: Megan Munce, Susie Neilson, and Brontë Wittpenn

This series highlights the systemic use of a flawed estimator tool, 360Value, that leaves homeowners drastically underinsured. The investigation found that major insurers, including State Farm, Farmers, CSAA, and USAA, have long known about the tool’s flaws yet continue to use it to set coverage limits without informing customers, leaving fire victims unable to rebuild and slowing community recovery.

Publication: San Francisco Chronicle

Regional/Local Publications

2025

Silver

Recovery Inc.

By: A.J. Lagoe, Steve Eckert, Kelly Dietz, and Gary Knox

This local TV investigation exposes widespread fraud in Minnesota’s addiction recovery industry, where treatment centers exploited vulnerable people and defrauded taxpayers of tens of millions of dollars. Reporters uncovered companies billing Medicaid for services never provided, including falsified counseling sessions, inflated transportation charges, and even taxpayer-funded movie nights disguised as treatment.

Publication: KARE 11

Regional/Local Publications

2025

Bronze

Fumed

By: David Leffler, Susan White, Jordan Gass-Pooré, Salina Arredondo, Savanna Strott, Jana Cholakovska, Mark Bush, Michael Ramos, and Jim Morris

This podcast series follows two “stubborn Texans” for two years as they try to fight the petrochemical industry encroaching on their working-class Houston suburb. Greg and Carolyn, are not typical environmental activists. They’re gun-carrying, Trump-voting, former petrochemical workers. Yet the serial abuses of oil barge operators in their waterfront and the lack of institutional checks force them to act for themselves.

Publication: Public Health Watch

Outstanding Young Journalist

2025

Gold

The Legacy of Luckey

By: Alexa York

A young reporter on her first story offers a vibrant demonstration of the power of local newspaper journalism. Using novel investigative methods, Alexa York’s investigation for The Blade uncovered radioactive contamination in groundwater near a former Cold War weapons site in Luckey, Ohio.

Publication: The Blade

Global/National Publications

2024

Gold

Prison to Plate

By: Margie Mason and Robin McDowell

This series was able to link some of the biggest American food corporations to prison labor, often in direct violation of their supply chain policies. The reporters spent two years filing public records requests in all 50 states and drove across the country tailing trucks and prison work vans to unearth how money was flowing to corporate giants through the use of prison labor and sometimes at the expense of prisoners’ lives.

Publication: Associated Press

View Awards Video

Author Q&A

Global/National Publications

2024

Silver

Corizon's Troubled Two-Step

By: Nicole Einbinder, Dakin Campbell, and Esther Kaplan

This series highlights the notorious legal maneuver that would have allowed a company to evade accountability. Through the use of court records, LLC registrations, short-seller reports, and other public records, the reporters were able to show meticulously how, with the help of the Texas bankruptcy system, executives and investors at Corizon were able to siphon off the company’s assets into a succession of corporate shell companies in order to avoid paying damages for these claims.

Publication: Business Insider

View Awards Video

Author Q&A

About Donald Barlett & James Steele

Donald Barlett and James Steele worked together for more than four decades, first at The Philadelphia Inquirer (1971-1997), where they won two Pulitzer Prizes and scores of other national journalism awards, then at Time magazine (1997-2006), where they earned two National Magazine Awards, becoming the first journalists in history to win both the Pulitzer and its magazine equivalent, and most recently were contributing editors at Vanity Fair (2006-2017).

The Washington Journalism Review said of Barlett and Steele: “They are almost certainly the best team in the history of investigative reporting.”