Written Journalism Awards 2022
(Works Produced in 2021)
Excellence in Written Reporting, News: Nicole Hong, Corina Knoll, Juliana Kim, Jonah E. Bromwich
Excellence in Written Reporting, Features: Zhaoyin Feng, Xinyan Yu, Jessica Lussenhop
Excellence in Written Reporting, News - Works Produced in 2021
ABOUT THE PROJECT: During the pandemic, there was an increase in violence against Asian Americans. The New York Times aggressively covered the individual attacks, as well as the overall impact it had on Asian communities, throughout 2021. Each article in this entry provides a deep dive on a specific issue related to the attacks, taking into account the broader context and illuminating the larger issue of violence against Asian American communities. The first article in the package is a richly-written piece by Corina Knoll that examines the attack on Than Than Htwe in a New York City subway, which began to fade from the headlines almost as soon as it appeared. Knoll examined the life that was lost and the lives that were destroyed, bringing Ms. Htwe back to the public consciousness.
In March 2021, when the deadly shootings at several spas in Atlanta were confirmed, Juliana Kim immediately got on a plane to cover the news. In the months after, she returned again and again to spend time with Randy and Eric Park, young men whose mother was among those killed and whose images, in the immediate aftermath, seemed to be everywhere. These conversations became the second story in the entry.
In the third article, Nicole Hong and Jonah Bromwich tried to answer the big question from the community: Why weren’t all the attacks prosecuted as hate crimes? They explored in their nuanced story how the hate crime law is not designed to account for many of the ways in which Asian Americans experience racism. All three pieces, singular in their depth of reporting, were widely read and shared. Eric Adams, now the mayor of New York City, and Congresswoman Grace Meng shared Nicole and Jonah’s story on social media as a way to raise more awareness about racism and attacks against Asian Americans in the city. Several prosecutors in New York City, the ones in charge of deciding what gets prosecuted as a hate crime, reached out privately to say that they had read the article. Readers of Knoll’s story tried to help find a job for Ms. Htwe’s son, who struggled after the attack.
RUNNER-UP: Jessi Prois, Kimmy Yam, Hanna Park and Caitlin Yoshiko Kandil, series: “Violence against Asian Americans and why 'hate crime' should be used carefully” (1 / 2 / 3), NBC News
Nicole Hong
(Reporter, The New York Times)
NICOLE HONG is a reporter for the Metro desk of the New York Times, where she writes about New York City's economy. She previously covered federal courts, law enforcement and criminal justice issues under the Trump and Obama administrations. Before joining the Times, Nicole worked for seven years at the Wall Street Journal, where she was part of a team that won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting. She is a graduate of Northwestern University.
Corina Knoll
(Reporter, The New York Times)
Juliana Kim
(Reporter, The New York Times)
Jonah Bromwich
(Reporter, The New York Times)
Excellence in Written Reporting, Features - Works Produced in 2021
Zhaoyin Feng, Xinyan Yu and Jessica Lussenhop, “Chinese dreams on Native American land: A tale of cannabis boom and bust,” BBC
ABOUT THE PROJECT: In the pandemic, hundreds of Chinese migrants moved to a remote city on the Navajo Nation Indian reservation in New Mexico, to do what they thought was legal agricultural work. Instead, they and the local Native community found themselves pitted against one another in a bizarre cautionary tale about the boom in cannabis production in the US, and the impact on Asian migrant labourers.
Jessica Lussenhop and Zhaoyin Feng of the BBC news went on a journey to New Mexico and Oklahoma, to investigate the Chinese migrants’ role in the row at Navajo Nation, and more broadly, in America’s cannabis boom and bust.
This story has received more than 1.9 million views, with a total engagement time of nearly 5 minutes. It has also been translated into Chinese and published on BBC Chinese, drawing hundreds of thousands of views.
It is the first publication on international media outlet to illustrate the surprising expansion of Chinese-American investment into the US cannabis industry, with in-depth interviews with Chinese migrants, Navajo Nation residents, local authorities, human trafficking NGO representatives and cannabis attorneys.
RUNNER-UP: Taylor Moore, “A silence louder than words,” Chicago Reader
Zhaoyin Feng
ZHAOYIN FENG is a journalist and documentary filmmaker. She is currently a correspondent at BBC World Service.
Jessica Lussenhop
JESSICA LUSSENHOP In 2021, Jessica was a staff writer for BBC North America and the host of the BBC podcast “Bad Cops,” about the downfall of the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force. She is a former fellow at This American Life. Jessica has since left the BBC and is currently a reporter for ProPublica, covering her home state of Minnesota.
Xinyan Yu
XINYAN YU is an award-winning video journalist and filmmaker based in Washington DC. Born and raised in Wuhan, China, Xinyan started her journalism career in 2012 working as a producer for BBC News in Beijing. For a decade, she's covered major breaking news across the Asia Pacific region and the United States for top-tier international media. Xinyan is now an independent filmmaker working on her first feature length documentary.