The New York City chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists announced on Monday that ProPublica won two Deadline Club Awards, which recognize the best work produced by journalists and news organizations in the area.
ProPublica’s Charles Ornstein and The New York Times’ Katie Thomas won in the Business Investigative Reporting category for their series Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s Crisis. The project uncovered widespread financial conflicts of interest at Memorial Sloan Kettering, an iconic New York institution, and led to a cascade of reforms not just at the hospital but at leading cancer centers and medical journals across the country. Most notably, within days of publishing their story on how Sloan Kettering’s top medical officer, Dr. José Baselga, failed to disclose the millions of dollars he’d received from drug and health care companies, Baselga was forced to resign from the hospital. He also later resigned from the board of Bristol-Myers Squibb.
Right to Fail, an investigation by ProPublica’s Joaquin Sapien and PBS Frontline’s Tom Jennings, won in the Newspaper or Digital Local News Reporting category. The series examined how New York’s ambitious effort to move hundreds of people with mental illness from group homes to their own supported housing apartments has sometimes proven perilous, even deadly. Sapien and Jennings found at least six questionable deaths and identified more than two dozen cases in which people in supported housing were not able to care for themselves, leaving them in unsafe or inhumane living conditions.
See a list of all the 2019 Deadline Club Award winners here.