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
Bronze
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.
Pulitzer Prize Recipient

Regional/Local Publications

2025
Gold
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.

Regional/Local Publications

2025
Silver
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.

Regional/Local Publications

2025
Bronze
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.

Outstanding Young Journalist

2025
Gold
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.

Global/National Publications

2024
Gold
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.

Global/National Publications

2024
Silver
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.

Global/National Publications

2024
Bronze
A small group of 3M scientists and lawyers knew in the 1970s that PFOS had made their way into the blood of people all over the country, yet the company continued producing millions of pounds of the chemicals until 2000 and continues to use other varieties of forever chemicals in over 16,000 of its products today. Despite the company’s 2022 pledge to phase out the use of forever chemicals by 2025, there is no guarantee the company will fulfill that pledge. As noted by Lerner, to this day “the company and its scientists have not admitted wrongdoing or faced criminal liability for producing forever chemicals or for concealing their harms.”

Regional/Local Publications

2024
Gold
This investigation helped uncover the immense toll Social Security repayment demands has on some of the nation’s most vulnerable families – the very people the Social Security system was designed to protect. It displayed exceptionally deep reporting to demonstrate the heavy-handed approach the Social Security Administration (SSA) takes in dealing with recovering overpayments to recipients – even when the overpayment was the mistake of the agency and had happened years prior.

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.”

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Image from barlettandsteele.com
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Barlett and Steele Award Medallion
The 2025 Barlett and Steele Awards are now open for submissions!
Submit your work in one of three categories. There are cash prizes for winners and never any entry fees!