Winners
The inaugural competition for the Dan Rather Medals for News and Guts generated outstanding work from student and professional journalists across the country. The entries covered a range of topics – from city, county and federal organizations to school administration to for-profit companies. What they shared in common was a demonstrated commitment to reporting the tough stories of 2023 that needed to be told.
Bloomberg News reporters Michael Riley, David Kocieniewski, Monte Reel, Jessica Brice, Eric Fan, Michael Smith, Natalie Obiko Pearson, Chris Cannon and Henry Baker received the professional prize for “How the US drives gun exports and fuels violence around the world,” a series that revealed the role Republican and Democratic administrations played in boosting the export of U.S.-made guns.
Theo Baker with The Stanford Daily won the first place collegiate prize for a series of articles about former Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, who resigned after an investigation found that he oversaw labs that manipulated research data.
A team from The Daily Northwestern that included Nicole Markus, Alyce Brown, Cole Reynolds and Divya Bhardwaj won the second place collegiate prize for “Former NU football player details hazing allegations after coach suspension,” which detailed the hazing accusations about the Northwestern University football team that included reports of sexual misconduct.
The third place collegiate prize went to Caitlyn Yaede, Carson Elm-Picard and Emmy Martin of The Daily Tar Heel for an Aug. 30 front page that featured the raw text messages that students sent and received as they hid in lockdown during a fatal shooting on campus. A professor at UNC was shot and killed in his office, and a graduate student who worked with him was charged with first-degree murder in the shooting.