Congratulations to Dean Starkman, whose Investigative Fund-supported cover story in theColumbia Journalism Review, has won the Mirror Award, which honors excellence in media industry reporting, in the best in-depth piece category. He also won the Bart Richards Award,for media criticism, which honors work that evaluates news media coverage of significant subjects or issues.
The May 2009 article, “Power Problem: The Business Press Did Everything But Take on the Institutions That Brought Down the Financial System,” is a hard-hitting look at whether the financial press abdicated their watchdog function in the months leading up to the fall of AIG and the spread of the economic crisis. After analysing more than 2,000 articles, Starkman and his team found that the story was gettable — and with some notable exceptions — was not got.