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A stellar track record:

Barlett & Steele Award Winners

Since their inception in 2007, the Barlett & Steele Awards have blazed a high-visibility path of excellence in rewarding incisive business reporting that “tells us something we don’t know.”

The awards are named for the illustrious investigative business journalist team of Don Barlett & Jim Steele, who have worked together more than four decades, receiving two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Magazine awards, and a long list of other journalism awards.

Administered by The Reynolds Center for Business Journalism, the Barlett & Steele awards for Gold, Silver and Bronze each fall honor journalists and news organizations ranging in size from local to international.

“We’ve been so impressed with the quality of these stories that year after year have delved into the stories that nobody knew about–or shed light on areas they thought they knew about,” said Jim Steele.

Global/National Publications

2022
Bronze
This brings the first important revelations about the largest medical mental-health startup, Cerebral, and its effort to bring telemedicine techniques to mental healthcare. With the demand for mental health services increasing, companies are finding ways to provide patients with quick solutions to their problems. Cerebral was one of the companies to start prescribing controlled substances online during relaxed rules that came out of the pandemic.

Regional/Local Publications

2022
Gold
The investigation found that companies pay to take people’s future settlement checks worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for immediate and much smaller payments. The reporting duo searched through thousands of pages of court documents to examine deals implemented from 2000 to 2020. They found a trend in places such as Minnesota that show how much money victims receive versus what the agreement was and the types of victims that suffer from yet another catastrophe.

Regional/Local Publications

2022
Silver
A year-long investigation examines the squalid living conditions in some of the city’s worst apartments. The reporters found that the housing shortage and government inaction enabled absentee landlords to squeeze the properties for higher profits while putting tenants’ safety in peril. Through a three-part series with character-driven stories and extensive data analysis, reporters show that much of the region’s affordable housing is nearly uninhabitable.

Regional/Local Publications

2022
Bronze
This story follows Thelma Freedman and her two grandsons who were hospitalized in 2019 for upper respiratory infections. They live in the Glades, an area in Florida that is home to growing half of the country’s cane sugar. Each year, growers will burn their fields as a harvesting technique that covers the town in ash. The investigation found that residents were exposed to pollutants in ways that monitoring systems had missed.

Outstanding Young Journalist

2022
Gold
This investigation revealed how easily companies can slip through major systemic gaps in the government systems that are intended to protect the most vulnerable. Bedi rigourously worked to connect with people who were harmed by the devices to continue telling their stories even after the initial story was published. Bedi’s reporting prompted Congress to investigate the FDA’s regulation of the HeartWare device and pushed the manufacturer, Medtronic, to expand financial assistance to consumers.

Best in Investigative Business

2021
Gold
This investigation exposed how the wealthiest people in America avoided paying their fair share of taxes at a time when wealth inequality has become a national crisis. Drawing on a massive collection of IRS data, the investigation revealed the shockingly low rates paid by billionaires and the machinations used to legally tell the IRS they make modest incomes while living lavish lifestyles.

Best in Investigative Business

2021
Silver
The investigation exposed devastating abuses against millions of workers in Malaysia and Indonesia, many of them women and children, who produce 85% of the world’s supply of palm oil. This ubiquitous but largely unrecognized commodity appears in roughly half the products on Western supermarket shelves, from foodstuffs to cosmetics, including those from such global companies as Nestle, Unilever, L’Oreal, Procter & Gamble, and the makers of Girl Scout cookies.

Best in Investigative Business

2021
Bronze
After scrutinizing three decades of records and thousands of emails they obtained, the reporters laid bare in agonizing detail how lawmakers put the profits of big business first. While tax policy changed to make the rich much richer, rural Oregonians suffered the consequences. The reporting team contacted more than 600 Oregonians through a statewide engagement campaign online, on the radio, and in community newspapers, finding deeply personal stories from Oregon’s timber country.

Best in Investigative Business

2020
Gold
Drawing on leaked records, the investigation centered on Isabel dos Santos, Africa’s wealthiest woman, who built a reputation on the false claim that she made her fortune through business acumen, grit and entrepreneurial spirit. The investigation was sparked by a leak of more than 715,000 documents and involved hundreds of interviews with sources in Angola.

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.”

Two men dressed in nice suits stand for a portrait
Image from barlettandsteele.com

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