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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.

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

Best in Investigative Business

2017

Silver

Sticking with the Pig: A tale of loyalty and loss

By: Tony Bartelme

Senior executives of the country’s largest franchiser of the iconic Piggly Wiggly grocery stores had urged employees to work harder during difficult times because they were a family of owners. But at the same time those executives were carting away millions of dollars at employee expense during the death spiral. Bartelme conducted interviews with 50 former employees who had put their faith in the company and numerous experts. He examined thousands of pages of IRS, Labor Department, SEC and corporation filings, while also obtaining internal memos, videos and emails.

Publication: The Post and Courier

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Author Q&A

Best in Investigative Business

2017

Bronze

Lowering the Bar

By: John Fauber, Kristina Fiore and Matt Wynn

This report showed how some of the resulting treatment regimens have become a source of serious side effects. It unveiled “medicalization” as a massive new market for drug companies in which uncontrolled anger is now intermittent explosive disorder, blood sugar a little too high is pre-diabetes and going to the bathroom frequently is overactive bladder syndrome. Eight non-life-threatening conditions were turned into medical disorders said to affect more than 180 million Americans. For example, drugs for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), once rare but now one in 23 adults, sent 28,000 people to emergency rooms in one year alone and, in Florida, overdoses involving the drugs were up 450 percent.

Publication: MedPage Today

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Author Q&A

Best in Investigative Business

2016

Gold

The Panama Papers

As the largest investigation in journalism history, the papers are a trove of leaked documents from inside Mossack Fonseca, a Panama-based law firm that creates offshore companies to hide the financial activities of the rich and powerful. A leak to Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung of 11.5 million documents involving 210,000 companies was shared with journalists and they found Mossack Fonseca created or managed companies for Ponzi schemes, drug kingpins and dozens of Americans accused of fraud or financial misconduct.

Publication: CPI’s International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and more than 100 media partners worldwide

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Author Q&A

Pulitzer Prize Recipient

Best in Investigative Business

2016

Silver

Testing Theranos

By: John Carreyrou, Christopher Weaver and Michael Siconolfi

This investigation exposed how the laboratory firm that claimed to test patient health by drawing just a few drops of blood with a finger prick seriously misled patients and investors. As a result of the stories, the company has revised or voided tens of thousands of inaccurate patient blood tests, closed its main laboratory and been sanctioned by federal health regulators. While facing contentious litigation threats from Theranos, the reporters also reported that former employees had filed complaints with regulatory agencies alleging the company concealed problems.

Publication: The Wall Street Journal

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Author Q&A

Best in Investigative Business

2016

Bronze

OxyContin's 12-Hour Problem

By: Harriet Ryan, Lisa Girion and Scott Glover

This investigation found that OxyContin, the nation’s bestselling painkiller, for many patients wears off hours earlier than its claim of 12-hour relief, worsening the addiction epidemic surrounding the drug. The Times, which has been monitoring the product for five years, obtained thousands of pages of confidential records from more than three decades covering the drug’s development and marketing by privately held Purdue Pharma. These indicated the firm knew about the product’s problem even before its 1996 debut, then continued to insist that it worked for 12 hours in the face of growing evidence from doctors and others that it didn’t.

Publication: The Los Angeles Times

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Author Q&A

Best in Investigative Business

2015

Gold

Fish Slavery

By: Robin McDowell, Margie Mason, Martha Mendoza and Esther Htusan

At considerable personal risk, reporters interviewed captive Burmese slaves on a remote Indonesian island to expose labor abuses by a Thai fishing industry that ships its cargo to major U.S. supermarkets and pet food companies. By satellite they also monitored shipments to a Thai port to determine which private companies were responsible. As a direct result of their reporting, 800 slaves were freed and suppliers were fired by the biggest Thai seafood company. In addition, U.S. business groups lodged protests with the Thai and Indonesian governments and an Indonesian government investigation resulted in arrests.

Publication: The Associated Press

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Author Q&A

Pulitzer Prize Recipient

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.”