ProPublica was recognized by the Radio Television Digital News Association on Thursday with an Edward R. Murrow award for overall excellence in the smaller digital organization category. Four investigative projects done in partnership with other newsrooms also received Murrow awards. The competition honors outstanding achievements in broadcast and digital news.
“Railroaded,” a partnership with Gray Television/InvestigateTV, won in the TV network hard news category. The investigation detailed the challenges communities face when they are besieged by trains that can block railroad crossings for hours or even days. The piece featured videos and photos of children in Hammond, Indiana, climbing over and crawling under parked trains operated by Norfolk Southern. The investigation involved the work of Topher Sanders and Dan Schwartz for ProPublica and Joce Sterman for Gray Television/InvestigateTV; it also included video by Scotty Smith for Gray Television/InvestigateTV and photography by Jamie Kelter Davis for ProPublica.
Within 48 hours of publishing the investigation, residents packed a public meeting to demand solutions, the Federal Railroad Administration issued a safety advisory, a bipartisan group of Indiana lawmakers sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Transportation pleading for change and Norfolk Southern’s CEO, Alan Shaw, immediately called the mayor of Hammond, promising improvements. The company agreed to make first-ever operational changes to how it moves trains in the community to minimize interruptions and agreed to work with the town on finding a permanent solution for the schoolchildren, likely a pedestrian bridge.
ProPublica and InvestigateTV have been monitoring the situation to hold the company to its word. Lawmakers everywhere called for reform; Sen. Rafael Warnock, D-Ga., cited the reporting when he added provisions to the proposed Railway Safety Act.
“Inside the Uvalde Response,” an investigative documentary by ProPublica, FRONTLINE and The Texas Tribune, won in the TV network news documentary category. The film and accompanying investigation provided a detailed and exhaustive analysis of the deeply flawed law enforcement response to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. It identified critical missteps and featured never-before-published interviews conducted by state and federal investigators with law enforcement officers that showed critical and long-overlooked gaps in preparedness between children and the officers expected to protect them. The series involved the work of Juanita Ceballos, Michelle Mizner and Lauren Prestileo for FRONTLINE; Lomi Kriel and Lexi Churchill for ProPublica and the Tribune; and Jinitzail Hernández and Zach Despart for the Tribune.
“How Columbia Ignored Women, Undermined Prosecutors and Protected a Predator for More Than 20 Years,” published in collaboration with New York Magazine, won in the large digital organization investigative reporting category. Health care journalist Laura Beil and former ProPublica Abrams fellow Bianca Fortis found that Columbia University had failed to act on years of warnings as Robert Hadden, an OB-GYN, abused at least hundreds of patients during his 25-year career at the university. In 2012, administrators allowed Hadden to continue seeing patients even after he was arrested for assaulting a patient.
The story prompted waves of criticism toward Columbia. State Assembly members held a press conference on campus. A unanimous resolution by the university senate said that the Hadden revelations have “shaken our community to the core.” The university announced a sweeping series of changes to address the school’s failures to protect patients who were sexually assaulted by Hadden. “Exposed: Cover-Up at Columbia University,” a podcast collaboration with Wondery Media that followed Beil and Fortis’ investigation, won in the large digital organization podcast category.
See RTDNA’s full list of Murrow Award winners.
