New York: The New York Times on Tuesday won a Loeb Award, among the highest honours in business journalism, for a series of stories detailing how the safety of the nation's food has been compromised by laxly enforced safeguards and industry shortcuts.
This year's Loeb Awards encompassed the major business stories of the past year, including the Toyota recall, Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme and investigations into the causes of the financial meltdown.
The winners were also spread out among some medium circulation newspapers, with winners coming from The Detroit News, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The Miami Herald.
The Loeb Awards have been presented for 37 years by Anderson School of Management at the University of California, 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.
They were handed out with newspapers still mired in a financial slump that has forced many publishers to reduce their staffs to offset a steep drop in their main source of revenue — advertising.
Declining revenues
Although the downturn has eased during the first half of the year, print advertising revenue is still sinking back to where it was in the mid-1980s as readers shift to free news online and marketers pour more of their budgets into less expensive internet options.
The Times series on food safety, which won the award in the large circulation newspaper category, included a piece detailing how some hamburger patties are made, focusing on the case of a woman who was paralysed after eating an E. coli-tainted burger.
Alix Freedman, deputy managing editor at The Wall Street Journal who is in charge of maintaining the newspaper's reputation for accuracy and fairness, received the Lawrence Minard Editor Award. The Wall Street Journal is a division of Rupert Murdoch's media conglomerate News Corp.
Walt Bogdanich, assistant editor in the investigative unit at The New York Times and a three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, was given the 2010 Lifetime Achievement Award.
Ted Anthony, Christopher S. Rugaber, Mike Schneider and Mike Baker of The Associated Press were finalists in the news services category for their work on an Economic Stress Index. The Stress Index stitched together a vast array of data to create a comprehensive view of the nation's econ-omic health, down to the county level.
