News

Small Business/Management/Career; Large

Winner – The Wall Street Journal:  GE: Burned out

  • Contributors – Thomas Gryta, Ted Mann
  • Judges’ Comments – General Electric helped to build modern America, and commanded special status — both for its financial success and also because it generated a management system emulated widely as the standard for grooming the best in business leadership. The Wall Street Journal’s story chronicled not only GE’s decline as a company, it described struggles in its management ranks that threw its lauded system into disarray. The level of detail demonstrates the reporters’ months of source-building. Polished writing gave life to the story, and sometimes managed to capture decades of context in just a sentence or two. The editors also clearly thought hard about how to present a story of such length in both print and online. It must not have been an easy decision to let a story go to more than 11,000 words, but it paid off with a tale and presentation that underscored the importance of a corporate giant in peril.

Honorable Mention – Bloomberg: In Trump’s America, bosses are accused of weaponizing the ICE crackdown

  • Contributors – Kartikay Mehrotra, Peter Waldman, Jonathan Levin
  • Judges’ Comments – This piece tackled important subject matter: the impact of immigration policy on how small businesses treat migrant workers. These workers are a legal part of the economy, often doing jobs no one else wants, but the story showed how their rights are restricted, and how threats of deportation are used to discourage reporting mistreatment. The story raised crucial questions about how policy changes are bleeding into the employment landscape. It fulfills a journalism mandate by shedding light on violations that might otherwise go unnoticed by the wider public, because the people most affected are not in positions of power.
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