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.

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.

Best in Investigative Business

2020
Silver
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.

Best in Investigative Business

2020
Bronze
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.

Best in Investigative Business

2019
Gold
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.

Best in Investigative Business

2019
Silver
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.

Best in Investigative Business

2019
Bronze
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.

Best in Investigative Business

2018
Gold
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.

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
Search

Get Two Minute Tips For Business Journalism Delivered To Your Email Every Tuesday

Two Minute Tips

Every Tuesday we send out a quick-read email with tips for business journalism. Sign up now and get one Tuesday.

Years

Categories

Place

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!