Reuters nets three top US journalism awards

The Gerald Loeb Awards, established in 1957 and administered by the UCLA Anderson School of Management, are among the most prestigious in US financial journalism.

Reuters journalists were among finalists in four of the 14 competition categories this year, as in 2012. A Reuters team whose reporting of Chesapeake Energy Corp led to a series of criminal and civil investigations into the company won top honours in the 2013 news services category. The team comprised Anna Driver, Brian Grow, Jeanine Prezioso, Janet Roberts, Joshua Schneyer, David Sheppard and John Shiffman.

London-based Reuters journalist Tom Bergin won in the beat reporting category for his series on corporate taxation, which unleashed a wave of criticism in Europe of major corporations over the accounting methods they use to minimise their tax payments.

In accepting their awards, the Reuters winners thanked editor-in-chief Stephen Adler and Thomson Reuters chairman David Thomson for encouraging more in-depth, enterprise journalism at Reuters over the past two years. Reuters journalists won Loeb Awards for the first time in 2012, when its journalists scooped top honours in the news service and blogging categories. Bloomberg has not won a Loeb Award since 2011.

Adler himself presented the Lawrence Minard Editor Award to Williams, who is based in New York. The award honours excellence of editing and recognises an editor whose work does not receive a byline or whose face does not appear on the air. Williams, in his speech, said all American journalists should support Reuters, Bloomberg and Dow Jones/The Wall Street Journal. He said the “big three” news services had bucked the trend of shrinking newsrooms in recent years and together accounted for about one fifth of jobs in journalism in the United States.

Adler hired Williams shortly after becoming editor-in-chief in 2011. Williams had spent nearly 19 years with The Wall Street Journal, most recently as its page one editor. He was previously the newspaper’s Europe editor, a Tokyo correspondent and Japan bureau chief. ■