Journalists from Marketplace’s “The Uncertain Hour,” Miami Herald and NBC News and Noticias Telemundo have won this year’s Economic Justice Journalism Awards. The National Press Foundation delivers the $4,000 awards to three journalists or news organizations for reporting on economic inequality and its effects on families in the U.S.
Krissy Clark, Peter Balonon-Rosen and Grace Rubin from Marketplace won for their podcast episode of “The Uncertain Hour” that investigated temp companies employing welfare participants. It won the prize for best work published by a small newsroom with fewer than 50 staff. NPF judges said it “did a great job of explaining such a complex program” and credited Clark’s near decade of reporting on the U.S. welfare system.
Miami Herald won for its year-long investigation “The Foreclosure Franchise” led by Ben Wieder, Shirsho Dasgupta, Sheridan Wall and Amelia Winger. The investigation into how cities across Florida “turbocharged” foreclosures over unpaid property fines, particularly in heavily Black neighborhoods, led to a sharp drop in new cases filed. Judges praised the highly impactful work, which was also cited by a legal group challenging the constitutionality of the fines with Florida’s Supreme Court and led cities to revamp their foreclosure processes. Miami Herald won in the category for newsroom with 150 or fewer staff.
NBC News and Noticias Telemundo won the large newsroom category for their year-long investigation into children working in dangerous jobs in slaughterhouses. Journalists Laura Strickler, Julia Ainsley, Didi Martinez, Damià Bonmatí, Ala’a Ibrahim, Marshall Crook, Rachael Morehouse, Shalini Sharma, Peter Klein and Catherine Kim contributed to “Slaughterhouse children: Child Labor exposed in America’s food industry.” The reporting revealed a pattern of more than 300,000 vulnerable and undocumented migrants coming into the U.S. without their parents, as young as 14, looking for jobs to fill a tight labor market in the American heartland. Judges said the 16-minute documentary exposed “horrific” conditions.
National Press Foundation judges for this award included to previous winners – Idrees Kahloon, Washington bureau chief for The Economist, and Anna Wolfe, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for Mississippi Today – as well as Heather Bryant, co-founder of Tiny News Collective and Jesse J. Holland, an award-winning author and journalism professor at George Washington University.
This award is offered in conjunction with briefings for journalists who took part in the Future of the American Child Reporting Fellowships in 2023 and 2024. Summaries and transcripts of those briefings, as well as videos, can be found in NPF’s Children & Families and Poverty and Inequality resource areas.
NPF has given three rounds of this award, previously known as the Poverty Awards.
The winners in 2022 were Kayla Canne of the Asbury Park Press, a team from WBEZ Chicago and freelancer Mya Frazier writing for the New York Times Magazine.
The 2021 awards went to Elizabeth Hlavinka and Shannon Firth of MedPage Today, Mountain State Spotlight’s Amelia Ferrell Knisely and The California Divide for reporting on what works to alleviate poverty.
The inaugural round of the awards went to Idrees Kahloon of The Economist and Anna Wolfe of Mississippi Today in 2020 for the best reporting on children and poverty in the United States.
These awards and the trainings are funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation and Heising-Simons Foundation. NPF is solely responsible for the content.
