Best business reporting from abroad in newspapers or wire services
AWARD YEAR: 2007
AWARD NAME: The Malcolm Forbes Award 2007
RECIPIENTS: Walt Bogdanich, Jake Hooker, Andrew Lehren, Brent McDonald, Robert Harris
AFFILIATION: The New York Times
HONORED WORK: “A Toxic Pipeline”
This series was an extraordinary combination of traditional gumshoe investigating and high tech innovation that resulted in a compelling, thorough and dramatic body of work that was clearly ahead of the curve of not only other journalistic organizations, but the governments of China and the United States. This team created a journalistic tour de force — from the Dashiel Hammett-like work of Jake Hooker, who traveled under assumed names and kept his notes under his mattress, to the dogged work of Walt Bogdanich in uncovering classified FDA documents that warned of problems with diethylene glycol, to the computer-assisted study that showed as many as 1,300 unlicensed companies selling pharmaceuticals. The series is a primer on how to do investigative journalism. The team worked with videojournalists to document the tragic toll that these counterfeit drugs took on innocent people, making this a truly multi-media series.
Citation for Excellence:
Michael Smith and Carlos Caminada
Bloomberg News
“Ethanol’s Deadly Brew”