Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter James Steele spoke with a panel of this year’s Barlett & Steele Award winners about investigative business reporting Monday at the Walter Cronkite School.
The annual award is sponsored by the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism. Panel moderator and Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism President Andrew Leckey said Don Barlett and Steele are the gold standard for quality investigative business journalism. The duo has won many awards for their investigative reporting together. The Barlett & Steele Award came together as a way to encourage and recognize the best reporting in the field.
“This year’s winners put together databases for information that didn’t exist before,” Leckey said. “It wasn’t just culling information others had put together. They built their own databases, which points out the importance of that area.”
The panel featured gold winners Kris Hundley and Kendall Taggart for their piece “America’s Worst Charities” with the Tampa Bay Times and the Center for Investigative Reporting, silver winner Louise Story for her piece in the New York Times titled “The United States of Subsidies” and bronze winner Rob Barry who worked with a group on the piece “Inside Game: How Corporate Insiders Profit Ahead of the Public” for the Wall Street Journal.
While the award-winning stories relied heavily on database reporting, Steele said the stories were superior because they also included a human element.
“These pieces represent the very best because it shows that the stories are not just anecdotal that there is a statistical component there,” Steele said. “At the same token, they show the human impact and the real-world results. It’s a marvelous marriage of new technology and old methods resulting in a really outstanding product.”
Steele said all three of the investigative projects represent the ongoing evolution of reporting, which is “eons” away from how business reporting was 20 years ago.
Throughout the discussion, each of the panelists mentioned the large amount of stress that obtaining accurate numbers and information can inflict.
“I spend every waking moment just thinking about how I’m wrong and everything is going to be terrible afterward,” Barry said. “I don’t actually sleep easily at all until I have found a critical mistake in the story.”
Gold award winners Hundley and Taggart said they had to sift through 10 years of data in order to accurately portray the corruption that exists in prominent U.S. charities.
“Along with being able to run around the country and knock on doors, there was just a lot of sitting in front of Excel spreadsheets and doing manual data entries and calling (Hundley) to complain,” Taggart said.
Leckey said Story was the “lone ranger” in her investigative piece since each of the other awarded projects had multiple reporters. Story said it took a few weeks to figure out how to even obtain the necessary information.
“I spent four months collecting the data,” Story said. “I had to kind of come into it from a different angle than people had tried in the past.”
Steele noted that each reporter honored that night built their stories off a central question.
“There’s nothing like reporting because what drives us, what drives all of the reporters up here, is curiosity,” Steele said. “Most of the great stories are in the papers and on TV all the time, but a lot of people don’t follow up.”
Contact the reporter at rebecca.brisley@asu.edu
