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Friday, June 27, 2008 6:11 AM

Mortgage Mess

Black Americans are much more likely than whites to get stuck paying high interest rates for their mortgages than whites, according to a comprehensive investigation by Aliza Appelbaum and Alden K. Loury of The Chicago Reporter. Their "An Equal Opportunity
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Wednesday, June 18, 2008 6:51 AM

The Housing Bubble

"Anatomy of a Meltdown: The Credit Crisis" by Alec Klein and Zachary A. Goldfarb of The Washington Post is a comprehensive, readable account of the housing boom and bust. In the first section of this three-part series, they trace the bubble's roots
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Monday, June 02, 2008 6:25 AM

Countdown to Collapse

In a fast-paced series, Kate Kelly of The Wall Street Journal chronicles "The Fall of Bear Stearns." She provides a wealth of details, as in this passage: The 40 top Bear Stearns Cos. executives listening to Alan Schwartz over lunch had spent the morning
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Thursday, May 01, 2008 8:00 AM

Hard to Swallow

Nationwide sales of bottled water have increased nearly 50 percent in the past five years. Behind the growth are some disturbing practices. First the water must be bottled. Here, in a special report called "Water's Edge," Ivan Penn of the St. Petersburg
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Tuesday, April 29, 2008 8:00 AM

Views From the Street

The Los Angeles Times recently published two stories that provide local perspectives on international problems. "Gas Prices Box in an Alabama Community," by Richard Fausset, describes how soaring gas prices have affected the people of Coy, Ala., where
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Wednesday, March 26, 2008 8:00 AM

Shell Game

Farah Stockman of the Boston Globe has produced an outstanding investigation into the tax practices of war contractor Kellogg Brown & Root, "Top Iraq Contractor Skirts US Taxes Offshore." KBR, a former subsidiary of Halliburton, has avoided hundreds
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Friday, February 29, 2008 8:30 AM

Bad Deeds

The Chicago Tribune has been producing outstanding articles on mortgage fraud. Their latest, "This House Was a Steal" by Susan Chandler, begins with a memorable scene: The new buyers of a rundown graystone on the South Side showed up Jan. 9 to look at
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Tuesday, February 12, 2008 7:00 AM

Exposing Powerful Interests

"After Mining Deal, Financier Donated to Clinton," by Jo Becker and Don Van Natta Jr. of The New York Times, is a tightly woven story of international intrigue, big money and politics. It focuses on a 2005 meeting attended by Canadian mining financier
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Friday, February 01, 2008 8:30 AM

The Advertising Game

Amy Schoenfeld and Vu Nguyen of The New York Times have developed a fun graphic that looks at how Super Bowl advertising has evolved over the past 20 years. "The Super Ad Bowl: Two Decades of Players" allows viewers to scroll through a
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Monday, December 31, 2007 10:00 AM

The Harder They Fall

Bloomberg's Mark Pittman, Bob Ivry and Kathleen M. Howley have produced an outstanding series on the over-the-top characters behind the rise and fall of the subprime mortgage market. It all started with a Chinese dinner: Representatives of five of Wall
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Thursday, December 06, 2007 8:30 AM

Flim-Flam Land

To track the global surge in fake goods, The Columbus Dispatch sent reporter Jeffrey Sheban and photographer Jeff Hinckley to the source of most knockoffs, China, and to its main distributors, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Thailand. Their report, "Fighting Fakes,"
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Friday, September 21, 2007 6:30 AM

Squeezing the Customer

Despite record-breaking profits, property insurance companies are paying less than promised to their customers when catastrophe strikes, David Dietz and Darrell Preston report in September's Bloomberg Markets. Dietz and Preston's "The Insurance Hoax" reveals
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Tuesday, September 18, 2007 8:30 AM

Dangerous Trade

We've all probably heard by now about U.S. companies that import dangerous toys and other products from China. Now Russell Carollo of The Sacramento Bee reveals that U.S. companies export equally dangerous goods to other countries. His story last week,
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Tuesday, September 04, 2007 8:30 AM

Working Heroes

On Labor Day, the Chicago Tribune featured strong stories about two people who contribute greatly to their workplaces in different ways. "An Exceptional Worker" by Barbara Rose profiles Desmond Wallace, a bagger at a Chicago grocery store who shows exceptional
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Wednesday, August 22, 2007 7:20 AM

Credit Squeeze

John Gittelsohn and Ronald Campbell of The Orange County Register have done a great job of localizing the national crisis over foreclosures and risky loans that has rocked the housing market and Wall Street. In "One Street's Subprime Struggle," Campbell
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