Financial crisis coverage dominates Loeb Awards

Financial crisis coverage dominates Loeb Awards
New York Times wins 3 Loeb Awards for business journalism, struggling McClatchy gets 3 honors


LOS ANGELES (AP) -- McClatchy & Co., one of the companies hardest hit by the crisis in the newspaper industry, was honored Monday for its coverage of the economic meltdown.
The Loeb Awards, among the highest honors in business journalism, have been presented for 36 years by Anderson School of Management at the University of California at Los Angeles. They were established in 1957 by Gerald Loeb, a financier and founding partner of E.F. Hutton, to encourage quality reporting in business, finance and the economy.

Even as media companies struggle with a chronic decline in advertising revenue, made worse by the recession, they continued to put resources towards investigative journalism in covering the biggest economic and business story of the past 70 years. A number of award recipients spoke of being given a year or more to travel to big cities and small towns across the U.S. to write stories of abusive mortgage practices and other financial misdeeds.

The New York Times, which received three Loeb Awards, was honored for "The Reckoning," a 19-part account of who and what was to blame for the financial crisis. Lawrence Ingrassia, business and financial editor at The New York Times and the driving force behind the series, received the Lawrence Minard Editor Award.

In accepting the honor, Ingrassia said the current era hearkens "back to the 1930's, not because we're in a depression, but because it's increasingly incumbent on the press to be the watchdog."

The New York Times' Gretchen Morgenson, who co-authored "The Reckoning" with eight colleagues, also won a Loeb Award in the beat writing category for her coverage of the follies of Wall Street.

She shared that win with Rick Rothacker of McClatchy publication The Charlotte Observer, who was recognized for anticipating how adjustable rate mortgages would topple Charlotte, N.C.-based bank Wachovia Corp. and ultimately force its takeover by Wells Fargo & Co. That newspaper also received an Honorable Mention for its investigative series on the poultry industry, "The Cruelest Cuts."

The Miami Herald, another former Knight Ridder publication now owned by McClatchy, was recognized in the medium and small newspapers category for "Borrowers Betrayed," which chronicled Florida's failure to prevent convicted felons from working in the state's mortgage industry and bilking lenders and borrowers out of millions of dollars. Read more... http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Financial-crisis-coverage-apf-3992981568.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=2&asset=&ccode=