Philip Meyer Award Winners
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Press release for the 2006 Meyer Awards

The National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, a joint program of IRE and the Missouri School of Journalism; the Knight Chair in Journalism at Arizona State University; and IRE announce the winners of the Philip Meyer Journalism Award, a contest to recognize the best journalism done using social science research methods.

The awards will be presented March 9 at the Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference in Cleveland. The first-place winner will receive $500; second and third will receive $300 and $200. The contest, for work published or broadcast between October 2005 and October 2006, attracted more than two dozen entries from across the country. Stories are available to IRE members through the IRE and NICAR Resource Center — just contact us at 573-882-3364 or rescntr@ire.org.

First Place

The Wall Street Journal "Perfect Payday," a series of articles over the past year that exposed the widespread practice of secretly backdating stock option grants to benefit corporate insiders. Lead writers Charles Forelle and James Bandler used a statistical model to calculate the wildly improbable odds that options grant dates would just happen to be so favorably profitable to dozens of executives at some of the nation’s best-known companies. Their stories about the scandal have spurred an ongoing federal securities investigation into rigged options at more than 100 companies to date.

Second Place

Gannett News Service for “Special Report: Rating Hospital Health Care,” an investigative package that rated more than 3,000 U.S. hospitals on how well they followed recommended medical guidelines for treating heart attack and heart failure patients. The stories by database editor Robert Benincasa and reporter Jennifer Brooks showed that patients in poor and rural areas were less likely to receive the recommended care. Their analysis took a national dataset detailing the treatments given to each patient and used a composite scoring methodology to rate each hospital.

Third Place

The Philadelphia Inquirer for “Camden Schools Investigation," a series of stories that uncovered a cheating scandal in the standardized testing being used by the Camden, NJ, school district. The stories by reporters Melanie Burney, Frank Kummer and Dwight Ott revealed that test scores in several Camden schools were dramatically higher that would be expected based on past performance, and ultimately led to the resignation of the district superintendent, an investigation, and strict monitoring by the state department of education.