A series of stories produced by the CUNY J-School’s NYCity News Service and the New York Daily News detailing the scourge of mold in New York City public housing has been named a finalist in the Deadline Club Awards competition.
The “Stop the Mold” reports are up again entries from Newsday and The Associated Press in the Newspaper or Digital Local News Reporting category. The winners of the annual competition, sponsored by the New York City chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, will be announced during a May 12 ceremony at the Waldorf Astoria.
In December, the Daily News ran a three-part series spotlighting the city’s losing battle to rid public housing of mold, and detailing the health and financial tolls extracted by the environmental crisis. J-School students, in addition to working on the stories for the paper and producing related videos, created StopTheMoldNY.com – a platform for tenants to tell their own stories, via videos, photos, social media posts and audio first-person accounts.
As a result of the series, several City Councilmembers grilled NYCHA officials about problems with the mold cleanup and related overtime spending. A city Department of Investigations report about the mold crisis, obtained via a Freedom of Information request days after the series began, largely backed the reports in the Daily News. The series was quickly followed by the release of a City Controller’s Office report that found NYCHA wasted $10 million on a consultant and squandered a chance to obtain nearly $700 million in federal funding for desperately needed repairs.
“Stop The Mold” started last year when the NYCity News Service approached Daily News Investigative Reporter Greg B. Smith, who has reported extensively in recent years on NYCHA’s woes, including the mold crisis.
The News Service applied for – and won – a $35,000 Challenge Fund for Innovation in Journalism Education grant. The fund – a partnership of the Online News Association, the Excellence and Ethics in Journalism Foundation, the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Democracy Fund – backs digitally driven, high-impact projects pairing journalism schools and professional media outlets.
The “Stop the Mold” project also recently was named a finalist in two categories in SPJ’s Region 1 Mark of Excellence Awards competition, which recognizes standout student journalism. The winners in the Region 1 competition, which covers most of the Northeast, will be announced April 18. Winners become eligible for national awards.