It’s been a busy few months for the McGraw Center’s Business Journalism Fellows. Following on from a series of hard-hitting stories published earlier in the year, the summer brought several impactful new stories delving into issues ranging from toxic pollutants and labor abuses to financial scams. Two McGraw Fellows were also honored with awards over the summer for the series each published last fall, and another has been nominated for the Gerald Loeb Award, the highest honor in business journalism.
Here’s the latest from the McGraw Fellows:
- The mini-podcast Tina Vasquez produced for Futuro Investigates and Prism Reports, “Heads Down: A Two-Part Investigation into the Migrant Guest Worker Program” was named a finalist for a 2024 Loeb Award in the audio category.
- The Los Angeles Times and the non-profit site Capital & Main featured an exposé by Robert Lopez detailing how California has sharply cut back its enforcement of heat-protection laws for agricultural workers, even as extreme heat has intensified. A follow-up story outlined efforts by outraged lawmakers to push legislation that would require the state to take stronger measures to ensure that workers have adequate shade, water and other protections amidst record-breaking heat. One week after Lopez’s first story ran –California regulators announced plans to hire more investigators and ramp up enforcement.
- Inside Climate News ran Jordan Gass-Pooré’s story on the dangerously high level of toxic chemicals found near an old manufacturing site in Rochester, NY, and the impact that has had on residents living nearby.
- It was a big awards season for April Simpson. The five-part podcast she produced last fall for the Center for Public Integrity examining the historic discrimination that Black farmers and ranchers have faced from the U.S. Department of Agriculture won awards from the NABJ, SABEW and the North American Agriculture Journalists over the summer.
- The Salt Lake Tribune published a probe by Emma Penrod and Eric Peterson of the Utah Investigative Journalism Project detailing the dangerous conditions faced by workers at mining giant US Magnesium.
- Macollvie Neel of The Haitian Times was honored by the New York Association of Black Journalists for her extensive coverage in 2023 of a cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme that targeted the Haitian-American community.
- In June, The Guardian ran an abridged version of Jessica Camille Aguirre’s deep dive into the scammers behind Europe’s biggest financial fraud as a highlighted “Long Read.” The full story ran as The Atavist’s featured story in March.
- The CITY published Jordan Gass-Pooré’s audio series on the impact of climate change on New York City’s toxic Superfund sites.
- In February, Amazon announced that it would pay $1.9 million to more than 700 Asian migrant workers to reimburse them for illegal, predatory fees they’d paid to get jobs in the conpany’s warehouses in Saudi Arabia. The payments came in response to stories Pramod Acharya wrote last fall for The Guardian and others as part of a joint media investigation detailing the illegal fees and abusive working conditions the workers faced.
- Joe Fassler’s exploration of the false promise of lab-grown “cultivated meat” ran in the New York Times.
- USA Today published Elizabeth Weise’s five-part series on the backlash against solar and wind energy plants, which are being banned across the country.
Applications for the Fall 2024 McGraw Fellowships are now open. You’ll find more information and the online application — due by October 6, 2024 — on the McGraw Center website.
The McGraw Center for Business Journalism was established at CUNY’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism in early 2014 by the family of the late Harold W. McGraw, Jr., former chairman and CEO of McGraw-Hill and long-time publisher of BusinessWeek magazine. The Center is dedicated to enhancing the depth and quality of business news coverage through training, student scholarships, and support for veteran journalists.