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Gregory Karp. The Morning Call (Allentown, Penn.)
Judges' comments:
Greg Karp puts a new twist on following the money. Karp cares about saving his readers much-needed cash, and he's showing them how to do it in a well-written column that never strays from its mission. The strong organization, along with bullets and boldface, also make for an attractive presentation. Greg succeeds in part because he avoids a bombastic tone -- the major pitfall of columnizing. His readers must know he's out to help them, and that he thinks the way they think about trying to get the most bang for their bucks. In a tough economy, a column like Greg's becomes even more valuable to readers.
[4123CO]
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Susan Miller. Ledger-Enquirer (Columbus, Ga.).
Judges' comments:
Susan Miller livens up her excellent small business column with humor. She offers solid and useful advice in a well-written and entertaining package. Susan provides great practical advice for her intended small-business audience. Her writing style is very accessible and she puts a lot of effort into finding appropriate sources, and examples, to illustrate the topics she chooses. When you read Susan, you have no doubt that she understands the challenges small businesses face and that she's there to help.
[4285CO]
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Dan Voelpel. The News-Tribune (Tacoma, Wash.).
Judges' comments:
Dan Voelpel's columns grab you from the first sentence. His voice is intensely local, yet he also remembers to step back and examine the bigger picture. Dan's columns show a zeal for old-style fact-finding, as opposed to relying on generalities (an occupational hazard for columnists). It's also evident that he cares about the economic and social health of the community he's writing about and for. He writes like a stakeholder, not like a marginally interested observer.
[4538CO] PDF
Greg Gatlin - Boston Herald
John Stancavage - Tulsa World
Tom Petruno - Los Angeles Times
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Liz Benston. "Looking in on Gaming." Las Vegas Sun.
Judges' Comments:
Liz Bentson brings wider audiences to the gaming world with her deep reporting and sparkling prose. Saving Harrah's from the wrecking ball. Indian casinos. Cathouse cocktail waitresses. A gaming board seat that "went to the man who was the most experienced person for the job but was also the least political of those running." Even a routine job-promotion press release turns to gold in Bentson's hands. A rare talent brought to what could be a rather mundane news notes blotter on a narrow industry. She really knows Vegas business.
[4332CO] PDF
Mitchell Schnurman. "Texas Should Take the Lead and Address Healthcare." Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
Judges' Comments:
Tight writing and muckraking skills are an all too rare combination, but Mitchell Schnurman gives readers of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram a healthy dose of both. Shovel by shovel he digs up his artifacts carefully and delivers them simply, with enough stink to anger readers, and enough wry wit to please almost any editor. He gave Radio Shack a wonderful beating, and carefully extracted his nuggets on the insider gas-leasing deals. One extraordinary skill: Criticizing a Bass family member's civic bungling without blowing up his own future. This is a writer who would get hired in an instant, even in a recession. Tremendous insights. Very valuable to the readers and the business community.
[4426CO]
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George Gombossy. "Watchdog." The Hartford Courant.
Judges' Comments:
Whether it's getting the right discount from BestBuy, or correcting the bills at the local utility, George Gombossy's column alone justifies the price of a subscription to the Hartford Courant. He's a tenacious bulldog performing a valuable public service. And his "Watchdog" columns have quickly lived up to their promise of holding organizations accountable and taking care of those who have been "ripped off, frustrated or caught in the run-around of bureaucratic denial." In an age of transience, he shows us why newspapers profit when they hang onto their most experienced talents.
[4775CO]
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Al Lewis - Denver Post
Bruce Goldberg - Denver Business Journal
Paul Tharp - New York Post
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Eileen Ambrose. "Eileen Ambrose" columns. The Baltimore Sun.
Judges' Comments:
Ambrose's columns are very reader friendly. For example, she tackles complex tax issues in one entry and breaks them down so they are easy for readers to understand why they are important. She doesn't bog down the reader with too much detail - she uses just enough to tell the story. Effective use of anecdotal leads While others were still writing about subprime loans, Ambrose found another area that should be of concern: the pitfalls of pay-day loans.
[4103CO]
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Al Lewis. "Al Lewis" columns. The Denver Post.
Judges' Comments:
Lewis shows that business writing can be fun and interesting as well as informative. His columns highlight the skill of a great storyteller. They are compelling, entertaining and spicy. Lewis draws the reader into his columns, reserving a seat in the front row for each performance. The writing is clever, witty and visual. He has the tempo and timing of a good comedian. The columns are all tightly written. For better or worse, you get the feeling you really know the people he is writing about.
[4420CO]
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Mary Jo Feldstein. "Money & Medicine." St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Judges' Comments:
Healthcare writing for the consumer as it should be. Feldstein grabs your interest with the human angle to her stories. Her column about the waitress with cancer who fell victim to a flawed healthcare system was chilling. In another column, she detailed very descriptively the potential conflicts in the medical device business. When she began writing the column last year, she said her mandate was to help readers navigate through the muddled maze of the healthcare system. She has stayed the course.
[4523CO]
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Rick Stine - Dow Jones Newswires
Martin Howell - Reuters
Ken Jaworowski - The New York Times
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Michelle Singletary. "A Shady Mortgage Lender Exposed." The Washington Post.
Judges' Comments:
Michelle Singletary's work illustrates a range of writing that's both approachable and explanatory. One column that helped a young person sort through choices and what that means to a budget gets close and offers useful information for anyone. Her careful, dogged pursuit of truth is on stage as well. She showed how one man's claims of security and great returns for customers were ether. When she figured out his scheme, she told the tale with a tone of accountability that reminds readers of our public service role. Her coverage of Financial Independence, an unlicensed mortgage firm operating in Maryland, spurred state and federal investigations of the company's founder.
[4156CO]
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David Leonhardt. "Economix." The New York Times.
Judges' Comments:
The judges appreciated the way David Leonhardt combined intellectual rigor with measured, yet ultimately deeply held, opinions in his columns. He regularly connects the economic dots for readers who don't have the time to do so on their own. And he follows the facts to reach conclusions rather than pushing an agenda with selective use of numbers. Never was the difference on display as much as in his piece on Lou Dobbs. These days, particularly, Leonhardt's approach is refreshing.
[4604CO]
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Joseph Nocera. "Talking BUsiness." The New York Times.
Judges' Comments:
You will find no sacred cows grazing in Joseph Nocera's columns. He routinely takes on the giants of American business, and exposes corporate hypocrisy at every step along the way. Last year, for example, he peeled the onion on Apple CEO Steve Jobs' options backdating issues, and Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz's Hamlet-like conflict between Starbucks' pursuit of global coffee domination and preserving the "soul" of the company. He also plumbed the depths of Bancroft family dysfunction that led to the sale of the venerable Dow Jones & Co. Each was classic Nocera, putting the flesh and blood of human drama on the bones of business coverage.
[4606CO] PDF
Chris Lester - Kansas City Star
Mark Horvit - Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc.
Cheryl Carpenter - The Charlotte Observer
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Greg David. Crain's New York Business.
Judges' comments:
Greg David doesn't mince words when going after slipshod journalism, CEOs done in by their own hubris, or crooked politicians and the business executives who look the other way "because they are embarrassed by their own role in the unseemly dealings..."
[4175CO]
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Brian Kaberline. Kansas City Business Journal.
Judges' comments:
They don't give Brian Kaberline a lot of room for his column, but he makes the most of it with trenchant observations of business and political life in Missouri. The topics range from the serious - the 111-item survey that the Missouri governor puts to Supreme Court nominees - to the even more serious, at least in Kansas City: the recruiting of a Minnesota barbecue restaurant to anchor a downtown revitalization project.
[4469CO]
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Steve Symanovich. San Francisco Business Times.
Judges' comments:
Steve Symanovich doesn't use his column to weigh in on the pressing business issues of the Bay Area. He wants you to laugh at the absurdity of work and life, and he succeeds with a skillfully light and economical writing touch.
[4761CO]
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Eric Wieffering - The Minneapolis Star Tribune
Bob Shallit - The Sacramento Bee
Ken Fuson - Des Moines Register
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James Saft. "By James Saft" columns. Reuters America Inc. Institutional.
Judges' Comments:
Ahead of the curve on monetary issues as the subprime crisis morphed into the credit crunch, his column was great beat reporting to show big-picture impact on economy. He is able to bring clarity to some potentially dense issues, such as the implications of banks' reluctance to lend to each other money for any length of time, or the threat of stagflation - which he wrote about in November.
[4275CO]
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Brett Arends. "Brett Arends" columns. TheStreet.com.
Judges' Comments:
Specializing in mutual funds, Arends does an excellent job of mining regulatory filings to hold fund managers and insiders accountable. He takes on the big guys - Countrywide's leaders and even Warren Buffett - with persuasive, well-reported columns that took a watchdog approach to mutual funds.
[4494CO]
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Jon D. Markman. "Jon Markman" columns. MSN Money.
Judges' Comments:
Markman tackles complex topics with clear language and lively writing. He provides reasons why conventional thinking about a cyclical rebound may be a naïve expectation right now. Well written, well researched and well argued, his column is everything a column should be while consistently taking advantage of the interactive nature of the Web. His reporting on how borrowed money was used to borrow more, creating a "liquidity factory," was fascinating - and scary. The judges finished the columns with a new understanding of key issues.
[4669CO]
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Randy Essex - Detroit Free Press
Rebecca Salner - San Jose Mercury News
Lynn Hicks - The Des Moines Register
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