Awards

Me (second from left) accepting the local news reporting award from The Deadline Club, May 22, 2017. Photo: The Deadline Club.

Reporting is it’s own award; there’s no better feeling in the world than knowing that you’ve helped inform public understanding of an important issue and helped spur reform or hold the powerful to account. I’ve been fortunate enough to win some recognition for my reporting – often for doing just that:

From The Deadline Club, New York City’s Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists:

From The New York State Society of Certified Public Accountants:

The team’s investigation, which included Kravitz and Parker, revealed tax breaks that landlords and developers received due to raising rent and overcharging tenants, which wasted millions of dollars a year in tax subsidies and contributed to the rise in New York’s homeless population levels. With help from the New York City Public Advocate’s office, ProPublica mapped more than 450,000 New York City eviction cases filed between January 2013 and June 2015 and created a database for New Yorkers to search and view those cases by street address.

Awarded to Cezary Podkul of ProPublica for his reporting and writing about a little understood financial debacle created by state and local governments who borrowed against their share of the Big Tobacco legal settlement turning a multi-generational windfall into a multi-generational legacy of debt.

From The Society of American Business Editors and Writers:

Cezary Podkul, for the outstanding reporting and analysis of his “Rent Racket” series, which uncovered significant abuse by developers of public tax money in New York City’s broken rent-stabilization system, enabled by regulators who look the other way and expose tenants in as many as 50,000 apartments to illegal rent increases and evictions.

The judges noted Podkul’s stellar work over a variety of publications, including USA Today, The Washington Post and Reuters, where he worked most recently before joining ProPublica last year. His work for USA Today helped free-up hundreds of millions in unspent highway funds earmarked by Congress for pet projects.

From Wallace House, University of Michigan:

  • I was a two-time finalist for the University’s Livingston Awards for Young Journalists, in 2017 and in 2016, for my “Rent Racket” reporting. The awards honor work by reporters under the age of 35 in print, broadcast, and digital journalism.

From The Society Of The Silurians, a veteran journalists’ club in New York:

Building special data bases to probe the public records left by Wall Street bond deals built around scheduled payoffs from the national tobacco settlement of 1999, these meticulously researched stories were the first to document that nearly half the money no longer goes to benefit taxpayers. Instead, it’s being siphoned off to cover a multi-generational legacy of debt taken on by dozens of the governments involved – debt that some may never be able to repay. Apps built by Yue Qiu and Lena Groeger allow readers to track the financial effects of these bad deals county by county in New York State and elsewhere.

From the UCLA Anderson School of Management:

From Columbia Journalism School, my alma mater: