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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.

Filter Past Winners

Best in Investigative Business

2020
Silver

When the Wells Run Dry

By: Mark Olalde & Ryan Menezes

This series revealed that companies are idling wells instead of paying for cleanup. Well operators are required to post bonds to cover cleanup costs in case they aren’t around when the time comes. The analysis, however, used state data to show that these bonds are a tiny fraction of the actual expense — only $100 million of the roughly $6 billion the state would need to clean up all the unplugged wells in California. The investigation identified 35,000 wells sitting idle, half for more than a decade, which emit nauseating levels of gas at times all throughout the nation.
Publication: Center for Public Integrity & the Los Angeles Times
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Best in Investigative Business

2020
Bronze

Profiting from the Poor

By: Wendi C. Thomas

This investigation examined two institutions that profited from the poor – Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare and Southeastern Emergency Physicians. Thousands of poor residents have been sued for unpaid hospital bills and the investigation revealed the defendants’ misfortune. The series prompted changes within both institutions that would better support people struggling to pay medical bills, including the erasure of more than $11 million in unpaid bills for more than 5,300 defendants.
Publication: MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, working with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network
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Best in Investigative Business

2019
Gold

Hidden Harm & Implant Files

By: Christina Jewett and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

Two separate entries received the gold award for coverage of the Food and Drug Administration’s granting of secret reporting exemptions to medical device makers in order to keep millions of malfunction and injury reports out of the public eye. Persistence by the journalists led the FDA to announce the largest modernization of its reporting system in a generation, and similar responses followed suit around the globe.
Publication: Kaiser Health News, the NBC News Investigative Unit and the Associated Press
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Best in Investigative Business

2019
Silver

PG&E: Wired to Fail

By: Russell Gold, Katherine Blunt and Rebecca Smith

This investigation explained how PG&E Corp., the nation’s largest utility, left hundreds of thousands of people vulnerable to wildfires sparked by equipment that already has caused the deaths of 85 people. Using a little-known state database of fires started by PG&E equipment, a Journal analysis showed the utility’s equipment had started more than one fire a day in recent years. Three hours after the article was published, PG&E’s CEO stepped down and the next day the company announced it would seek bankruptcy protection.
Publication: The Wall Street Journal
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Best in Investigative Business

2019
Bronze

Polluted by Money

By: Rob Davis

The series noted that powerful industries have killed, weakened or stalled efforts to deal with many environmental issues. Coverage involved hundreds of interviews and thousands of pages of public records to document how unlimited contributions affected decision-making. Four months after the series launched, Oregon lawmakers enacted the state’s first campaign finance restrictions in decades.
Publication: The Oregonian
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Best in Investigative Business

2018
Gold

Brexit's Big Short

By: Cam Simpson, Gavin Finch and Kit Chellel

This investigation exposed how a handful of hedge funds netted hundreds of millions of dollars in the largest major currency crash in the modern financial system, tied to the Brexit vote. While U.K. law restricts pollsters from releasing exit-poll data before voting ends, secret exit polls purchased from leading pollsters provided non-public, market-moving data that revealed how Britons voted. This put some funds in position to earn fortunes short-selling the British pound, while others secretly bought access to polls before they were published in the press and offered trades.
Publication: Bloomberg News
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Best in Investigative Business

2018
Silver

The Investigation of Michael Cohen

By: Michael Rothfeld, Joe Palazzolo, Rebecca Ballhaus, Peter Nicholas and Alexandra Berzon

They began their string of exclusives by uncovering the $130,000 paid for silence to adult film star Stormy Daniels from candidate Donald Trump a month before the 2016 election. They followed up by revealing a $1.6 million settlement for a top Republican fundraiser and the exposure of Cohen’s D.C. shell company that he pitched as an entrée to the President. Another story provided details of Cohen’s often turbulent relationship with Trump, who came to doubt the attorney’s professional abilities and judgment. Unlike many investigative projects, this one did not begin life as a planned series but instead grew organically as the reporters amassed exclusive after exclusive.
Publication: The Wall Street Journal
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Best in Investigative Business

2018
Bronze

Cutting 'Old Heads' at IBM

By: Peter Gosselin, Ariana Tobin and Ranjani Chakraborty

This investigation documented unfair practices targeting older employees at one of America’s most storied companies. The reporters combined traditional reporting with imaginative digital tools. IBM calibrated its human resources system to jettison thousands of workers ages 40 and over, often to make room for younger employees. Despite laws and rules designed to protect what some executives called these “old heads,” it denied information on their legal rights and redress, encouraged employees targeted for layoff to apply for other IBM positions while advising managers not to hire them, told some older employees their skills were out of date and hired workers back as cheaper contract workers.
Publication: ProPublica
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Best in Investigative Business

2017
Gold

Dangerous Doses

By: Sam Roe, Ray Long and Karisa King

In a collaborative staff project that drew in an additional 15 journalists, the Tribune tested 255 pharmacies to see how often stores dispense dangerous drug pairs without warning patients. Fifty-two percent of those tested sold the medications without mentioning potential interaction, a result that was the same whether in affluent or poor neighborhoods. In an immediate industrywide response, the nation’s largest pharmacy retailers announced significant steps to improve patient safety, including better computer systems and training for pharmacists and technicians.
Publication: Chicago Tribune
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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.”

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

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