Journalism Excellence Awards by Subject 2021
(Works Produced in 2020)
Excellence in Investigative Reporting: Robert Perez and Agnel Philip
Excellence in Sports Reporting: Andrea Hsu
Excellence in Science/Environment/Health Reporting: Usha McFarling
Excellence in Arts and Culture/Entertainment Reporting: Zeyi Yang and Meaghan Tobin
Excellence in Political Reporting: Jessica Prois, Alexia Fernández Campbell, Alex Ellerbeck, Kimmy Yam and Jamie Hopkins
Excellence in International Reporting: Shen Lu
Excellence in Pacific Islander Reporting: Anita Hofschneider
Excellence in Business/Consumer/Tech Reporting: Rosalie Chan
Excellence in Commentary/Op-Ed/Perspective: Shen Lu
Excellence in Investigative Reporting - Works Produced in 2020
Robert Perez
(Investigative reporter, Honolulu Star-Advertiser)
ROBERT PEREZ is an investigative reporter for the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and a distinguished local-reporting fellow for ProPublica. He has been a journalist for more than 40 years, working at newspapers in Hawaii, California, Florida and Guam, where he’s from.
ABOUT THE PROJECT: The impact from our investigation was immediate – and sustained. Native Hawaiians leaders said reaction was like nothing they’ve ever seen before. Beneficiaries asked what they could do to trigger reforms in the homesteading program. Even officials at the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, the agency that manages the program, cited the Star-Advertiser/ProPublica findings to underscore the need for bold action. "Universally, it was agreed that the status quo is not working for our department," a top executive told the commission that oversees the department following publication of the initial stories. "The status quo is not working for our beneficiaries.”
Legislators at the state and federal level subsequently passed record funding for DHHL, and beneficiary leaders and others credited the news organizations’ stories with creating unprecedented awareness of the needs and faults of the homesteading program. One Native Hawaiian activist recently texted a reporter and referred to what she described as a “GREAT AWAKENING.” Finally, she wrote, “We’re being recognized.”
When the speaker of Hawaii’s House of Representatives opened the 2022 legislative session in January, he unveiled a proposal to provide a one-time $600 million appropriation to DHHL to address the growing waitlist problem. The priority, he said, was to help Native Hawaiians who could not afford to purchase their own homes – the very group the Star-Advertiser/ProPublica investigation found was being left behind. The lawmaker said in an interview that the news organizations' coverage was “absolutely a factor” in the House’s decision to pursue the record funding. (For more details, see https://www.propublica.org/article/lawmakers-propose-600-million-to-fix-housing-program-for-native-hawaiians).
The $600 million, if approved, would be the most by far that the Legislature has ever approved for DHHL in a single year. The previous record, $78 million, was authorized just last year even as legislators cut funding for many other state agencies because of the economic blows from the coronavirus pandemic. This year, however, the state’s financial picture is much improved, and the $600 million proposal is sailing through the Legislature. The House and Senate money committees recently approved the legislation by unanimous votes. Beneficiaries and others have submitted hundreds of pages of written testimony in support of the measure.
At the federal level, Congress also has authorized record funding, though at a much lower amount. Lawmakers recently sent to President Biden a bill that would provide the land trust with more than $22 million in housing for Native Hawaiians. The previous high was $12 million.
When DHHL leaders challenged staff to propose bold solutions, one proved too controversial. A proposal to develop a casino on trust land on Oahu never got traction at the Legislature. But another idea, providing down-payment assistance to beneficiaries to purchase homes off trust land, is still alive. The current bill appropriating $600 million for the program would set aside $112 million for such assistance.
RUNNER UP: Tie: Sarah Belle Lin, Darwin BondGraham, Jonah Owen Lamb, “Did OPD violate its own policies against protesters? We investigated,” The OaklandSide and Nia Wong, “Molest Me Mondays,” KXLY-TV
Agnel Philip
(Data reporter, ProPublica)
Agnel Philip accepts the 2021 Excellence in Investigative Reporting Award on behalf of himself and Rob Perez.
Excellence in Sports Reporting -
Works Produced in 2020
Andrea Hsu, “For Fans Hungry for Baseball, Taiwanese Announcer Made Right Call in Unusual Season,” NPR
ABOUT THE PROJECT: In the fall of 2020, the U.S. was in the dark days of the pandemic. Much of society remained shuttered. Covid cases were on the rise, and vaccines were still months away. Amid the gloom, NPR’s Andrea Hsu brought listeners the uplifting story of Richard Wang, who became an unlikely hero to baseball fans around the world when he began broadcasting Taiwanese baseball games in English, via the internet. With most other professional sports suspended, sports fans from around the world, including top baseball writers in the U.S., tuned in to Wang’s broadcasts, as much for the baseball as for the cultural tour that he took viewers on between innings. Over several delightful minutes, Hsu’s story artfully weaves together game broadcasts, archival tape, and an engaging interview with the Taiwan-born, Boston-educated baseball announcer, whose love of the sport grew from his days as a graduate student living close enough to Fenway Park to hear the roar of the crowds. At just the moment we needed it, Hsu’s feature on Richard Wang cemented the notion that even in a pandemic, when countries are shut off from one another and people are locked in their homes, there is more in this world that unites us than divides us. We proudly submit her story for the Excellence in Sports Reporting category of the AAJA Awards and encourage you to listen to the story via the link provided.
RUNNER UP: Wufei Yu, “China is an Underrated Rock Climbing Paradise,” Outside
Andrea Hsu
(Labor and Workplace Correspondent, NPR)
ANDREA HSU is NPR's labor and workplace correspondent. Hsu first joined NPR in 2002 and spent nearly two decades as a producer for All Things Considered. Through interviews and in-depth series, she covered topics ranging from America's opioid epidemic to emerging research at the intersection of music and the brain. She led the award-winning NPR team that happened to be in Sichuan Province, China, when a massive earthquake struck in 2008. In 2020, she reported a series of stories on the pandemic's uneven toll on women, capturing the angst that women, especially mothers, were experiencing across the country.
Excellence in Science/Environment/Health Reporting - Works Produced in 2020
Usha McFarling
(National Science Coverage, STAT)
USHA LEE MCFARLING is a national science correspondent for STAT, covering issues of race and health equity and toll of the Covid-19 pandemic on marginalized communities. She previously reported for the Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Knight Ridder Washington Bureau, and the San Antonio Light, and has taught journalism at the University of Washington. Her work on the diseased state of the world's oceans earned the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism.
ABOUT THE PROJECT: These stories may seem familiar now, this far into the pandemic, but in 2020, each of these stories broke new ground and were followed by many other news outlets. My April 2020 story about how community clinics in Los Angeles were seeing devastation among the ethnic and racial groups they served was an early harbinger of what has become so well known: that patients of color and front line workers overwhelmingly became victim to the pandemic. My story on the high death toll among Filipino and Filipina nurses (who work in ICUs and nursing homes in numbers far higher than their population within the U.S. ) was the first to explore the death toll, stress, and disrespect these medical workers were facing as they risked their own lives and worked desperately to provide patient care. It was later followed by dozens of similar articles in other outlets. My story on how the Cherokee Nation responded to the pandemic completely challenged the trope of the "poor Native," showing how the Cherokee tribal response, far superior to that of the U.S. nation which surrounds it, saved hundreds of lives and earned the respect of some of the nation's highest ranking Covid officials. Despite the intense and non-stop coverage of Covid throughout 2020 by many news outlets, the stories in this series were all far ahead of other news coverage and showed clearly how Covid was devastating marginalized communities and how they were responding. These stories were among the highest trafficked stories on our heavily read news site and several were chosen for lists of "must read" pandemic stories by journalists such as The Atlantic's Ed Yong.
RUNNER UP: David Ono, “Hiroshima Bomb Survivor,” KABC
Excellence in Arts & Culture / Entertainment Reporting - Works Produced in 2020
Zeyi Yang and Meaghan Tobin, “China's Subtitle Army,” Rest of World
Zeyi Yang
(Fellow, Rest of World)
ZEYI YANG is a journalist based in New York City. Currently, he works as a China and East Asia tech reporter for MIT Technology Review, but his journalistic interests also lie in immigration, race, LGBTQ issues, and everything related to China.
ABOUT THE PROJECT: This is the first English-language article that reported on the world of LGBTQ cinema translation in China. The story was mentioned/recommended in the publication China Digital Times, the newsletter Numlock (subscribed by thousands), and a media collection project by the international nonprofit Atlas of the Future. It was also aggregated by the popular tech news website Techmeme.
RUNNER UP: Carren Jao and Mia Nakaji Monnier, “'In Plain Sight': 80 Artists Take Over the Skies in Support of Immigrant Rights,” KCET
Meaghan Tobin
(Reporter, Rest of World)
MEAGHAN TOBIN is a reporter at Rest of World focused on e-commerce and the impact of Chinese tech outside of China. She was previously a staff writer at the South China Morning Post covering geopolitics and public health in Southeast Asia and the Pacific and based in Taipei, Beijing, and Hong Kong.
Excellence in Political Reporting - Works Produced in 2020
Jessica Prois
(Editorial Director of NBC Asian America, NBC News)
Jessica Prois is the editorial director of NBC Asian America. She previously launched HuffPost Asian Voices and served as the section's executive editor. Her work has appeared in outlets including New York Magazine, NPR, Elle, Cosmo and more. Jessica is the recipient of a S.I. Newhouse journalism fellowship and a Johns Hopkins/Gates Foundation fellowship.
ABOUT THE PROJECT: NBC Asian America co-edited and co-published a piece with the Center for Public Integrity for which reporters interviewed dozens of sources about the fact that federal agencies were doing little about the rise in anti-Asian hate, compared to the wake of past events such as SARS and 9-11.
We were the first to publish this angle, along with coverage of proposed solutions, and it was cited in a letter from Congress members to A.G. Barr, asking the DOJ to condemn anti-Asian bias.
Our staff reporter Kimmy Yam then reported on Senate Democrats demanding action from CDC and DOJ to curb COVID racism, citing our original article. Kimmy was then first to report on The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights agreeing to their demands and taking action. It voted unanimously to address anti-Asian racism and xenophobia amid the pandemic and issue guidance to federal agencies on how to prevent it.
Alex Ellerbeck
(American University Fellow, Center for Public Integrity)
Alexia Fernández Campbell
(Senior Reporter, Center for Public Integrity)
Kimmy Yam
(Reporter, NBC News)
Jamie Smith Hopkins
(Editor/Senior Reporter, Center for Public Integrity)
Excellence in International Reporting - Works Produced in 2020
Shen Lu, “Death of a Quantum Man,” The Wire China
Shen Lu
(China tech reporter, WSJ)
Shen Lu covers China’s technology sector for The Wall Street Journal. She has reported on China from in and outside its borders since 2015. Previously, she was a senior reporter at Protocol and worked for CNN. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy and Politico Magazine, among others.
ABOUT THE PROJECT: The story won honorable mention, the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) 2021 Awards in the Excellence in Feature Writing category.
Zhang Shoucheng, a brilliant scientist at Stanford and a successful venture capitalist, was caught between U.S. and Chinese national interests. When he was found dead in late 2018, the intrigue only grew.
I started investigating the death of Zhang, which led to tremendous suspicion, a year after he committed suicide. Rumors abounded when news of his suicide broke in December 2018. Many suspected the U.S. government killed the scientist who straddled two counties, and others thought the Chinese government had him murdered.
One major difficulty I encountered during the investigation was that no one wanted to talk about the high-profile and ultra-sensitive case. Zhang’s former colleagues at Danhua Capital, a venture capital firm Zhang founded, refused to talk to me. His business partners kept their mouths shut. Stanford University didn’t respond to inquiries. U.S. government offices, including the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office, that alleged Zhang’s venture capital firm had connections with the Chinese government, didn’t respond to inquiries for comment. His family initially didn’t respond to my messages and phone calls because they were deeply hurt by rumors spread widely on Chinese social media. At the very last minute, when I was finishing the story, the Zhangs’ family spokesperson reached out to me, willing to answer my questions because they were moved by my relentless pursuit of the truth. Much of the information about Zhang and his company had already been deleted when I was working on the story.
After spending months working on this investigative story, I was able to retrieve the cached information through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. I also used PitchBook to look for the companies Zhang’s firm, a private company, had invested in over the years and built a database out of that information. I was able to sort out the ones that were Blockchain-related and the ones that fall in the category that the U.S. government suspected that were developing so-called dual-use technologies exploitable for both commercial and military purposes. This information served as important data points for my story.
Many international and national publications, including The New York Times, looked into this high-profile case but eventually dropped their investigations. Months in the works, my investigation into Zhang’s suicide managed to marry publicly-available information in two languages — English and Chinese — with dozens of probing interviews with Zhang’s friends, students and colleagues at Stanford University, multiple FOIA requests and requests for the police report and the medical examiner’s report about his death to produce a compelling, disturbing and complicated story that debunked all the prevailing rumors. And it was the first and only story that gave a detailed account of the life and death of the prominent Chinese American scientist and entrepreneur, who was among the first casualties of the U.S.-China trade war.
Excellence in Pacific Islander Reporting - Works Produced in 2020
Anita Hofschneider
(Reporter, Honolulu Civil Beat)
ANITA HOFSCHNEIDER is a reporter at Honolulu Civil Beat.
ABOUT THE PROJECT: My project, Hardest Hit Communities, was an ongoing series of stories about racial and ethnic disparities in Hawaii during the pandemic with the help of a 2020 Center for Health Journalism grant. Two months after I reported on how the state fell short of helping Pacific Islander communities during the pandemic, the Health Department established a contact tracing team dedicated to Pacific communities including people who spoke different Pacific Islander languages.
My work raised awareness of the challenges Pacific communities were facing and helped divert resources toward them. My reporting was cited by the U.S. Department of Interior in an announcement of $1 million of funding to address Covid-19 disparities among Pacific Islanders. My work was also cited in a report by the Hawai‘i Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights raising concerns about pandemic inequities. Honolulu City Councilwoman Esther Kiaʻāina also cited my reporting in a press release about the importance of data disaggregation for Pacific communities.
Readers also spent more time on my story about Pacific Islander burials than any other that I’ve penned in the past year. My project was also the first time that Civil Beat published stories in languages other than English — we published Covid resources in Tagalog, Kosraean, Marshallese and Chuukese and translated stories into Tagalog, Marshallese and Chuukese, which enabled us to reach non-English-speaking communities for the first time.
RUNNER UP: Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson, "Pacific Islanders in US hospitalised with Covid-19 at up to 10 times the rate of other groups," The Guardian
Excellence in Business/Consumer/Tech Reporting - Works Produced in 2020
Rosalie Chan, "Students say that Holberton School, is more like 'Lord of the Flies,'" Business Insider
Rosalie Chan
(Correspondent, Insider)
ROSALIE CHAN is a correspondent covering enterprise tech and cloud computing at Insider. Rosalie, who is based in San Francisco, joined Insider after working as a software engineer and freelance journalist. She has a Bachelor of Science in journalism and computer science from Northwestern University. Her work has previously appeared in TIME, the Huffington Post, VICE, Pacific Standard, Inverse, Chicago magazine, the Chicago Reporter, and more.
ABOUT THE PROJECT: This was the first article to report on the culture at Holberton School, a coding bootcamp. Coding bootcamps are on the rise, yet some take advantage of students and don't fulfill their promises to students looking for financial stability and finding a job. It also brought to light some of the pitfalls of income share agreements, which are becoming popular among coding bootcamps, but are not yet regulated. Later in 2020, Harper's magazine also published a long form feature on Holberton School, showing the story's impact. Holberton School has since pivoted to become an edtech company. This is a standalone story, but I have covered bootcamps extensively, and in 2019 I was the first journalist to break the story on the culture inside Lambda School, another coding bootcamp. The Verge, the Information, and New York Magazine subsequently wrote about Lambda School.
RUNNER UP: Tracy Jan, “A New Gentrification Crisis,” The Washington Post
Rosalie Chan accepts the 2021 Business/Consumer/Tech Reporting Award.
Excellence in Commentary/Op-Ed/Perspective - Works Produced in 2020
Shen Lu, “Scallion Dutch Baby: How I Revised My Recipe for Home,” ChinaFile
Shen Lu
(China tech reporter, WSJ)
Shen Lu covers China’s technology sector for The Wall Street Journal. She has reported on China from in and outside its borders since 2015. Previously, she was a senior reporter at Protocol and worked for CNN. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy and Politico Magazine, among others.
ABOUT THE PROJECT: In this essay, I wrote about quarantine cooking being my refuge in 2020, a hard year for a Chinese immigrant journalist living in the US. But it isn't really about food. It may be full of osmanthus scented rice cakes, red braised pork and spring bamboo. But it's about now, in all of its ugliness and despair and hard won moments of deliverance. The piece resonated with many Chinese immigrants and was one of the best-read pieces on ChinaFile in 2020.
Selected comments from writers and readers:
The finest piece of food writing I’ve read this year, and perhaps ever. Thank you for making me smile and making me weep @shenlulushen, I find solace and shelter in the kitchen too. — Frankie Huang, writer https://twitter.com/ourobororoboruo/status/1269318608494223362?s=21
Here, @shenlulushen reflects on cooking in the age of coronavirus & being a Chinese journalist in the US at this moment. — Ed Wong https://twitter.com/ewong/status/1269334044380213249?s=21
A new piece that, while about the experience of a journalist, has a lot to offer those in the university world, honestly & beautifully written, mixing commentary on food and on politics in unexpected ways chinafile.com/reporting-opin… by @shenlulushen of @CNStorytellers via @ChinaFile — Jeff Wasserstorm, historian https://twitter.com/jwassers/status/1269048635779473408?s=21
“I slice doubt, wrap confusion, simmer fear, and steam despair.” How are you coping with the current hardship cocktail? Here a lovely piece on @ChinaFile where cooking and exploring and musing is a refuge. — Ilaria Maria Sala, writer https://twitter.com/ilariamariasala/status/1270158752973381632?s=21
Revisiting this wonderful essay from @shenlulushen on longing and belonging, displacement and roots, red-braised pork and Boston pizza. A feast of grace and insight on living in America during this hard hard year. ChinaFile editor https://twitter.com/susanjakes/status/1339234948046336008?s=21
RUNNER UP: Yangyang Cheng, “Of the Virus and God, Orange Peels and the Party,” The New York Times