The Silurians Press Club

 The second President’s Choice honor was awarded to “The Migrant Experience, From the Border to Shelter,” by Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Todd Heisler and Juan Arredondo  of the New York Times. No issue has been more pressing or challenging for New York than the influx of migrants.

For this two-part project, reporter Ferré-Sadurní teamed up first with photographer/videographer Arredondo for an immersive profile of a Venezuelan father, mother and their three young children. The family, over the course of many arduous months, begged, borrowed and willed their way through Chile, Ecuador, Peru and Colombia, circumventing border checkpoints in Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala, to reach Mexico and, ultimately, New York City. 

The family’s journey took them through a jungle littered with bodies of migrants who died enroute, and an obstacle course of corrupt police officers, smugglers and immigration checkpoints that the family was forced to traverse—or circumvent—on foot and, sometimes, as stowaways atop moving freight trains.



 Ferré-Sadurní next teamed up with The Times’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Todd Heisler  for an in-depth, behind-the-scenes look into New York City’s ad-hoc network of migrant shelters and how its inhabitants interact with each other and their surroundings. Ferré-Sadurní did not shy away from the frailties and mistakes made by some of his subjects, including prison time in their native countries and instances of domestic violence. His words are paired with vivid and wrenching photos and video taken by Heisler and Arredondo. As one reader wrote: “No one reading [these stories] could, in good conscience, resort to caricature or demagoguery in addressing [the migrants’] plight or their reasons for being here.” 

Breaking News

 Bloomberg News had been covering UnitedHealthcare’s annual “investor day” conference at the Hilton, when the unthinkable happened: The head of the health insurance company was gunned down in cold blood on the street outside the hotel. And as conference attendees’ phones were lighting up, Mike Bloomberg’s crack journalistic enterprise put news of the murder on the wire and went on to publish a series of stories detailing the events of the day, profiling CEO Brian Thompson—an affable family man from Minnesota—and writing about corporations’ mixed records on protecting their executives from violence. For that effort, Bloomberg’s Myles Miller, John Tozzi, Antonia Mufarech, David Voreacos and Matthew Boyle took home the Medallion in Breaking News for “The CEO Killing That Shocked the World.” 

Feature News

The Times also won a Medallion in the Feature News category with a story headlined “Grief & Belief on Death Row: An Atheist Chaplain and a Death Row Inmateʼs Final Hours,” by Emma Goldberg. The reporter’s beat for this story was death row at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, Okla.—known as “Big Mac”—where last year Phillip Hancock, a convicted murderer of two men, awaited his execution. The local connection? Hancock had requested that Devin Moss—who was both a prison chaplain and a Brooklynite—guide him spiritually to the death chamber. What they had in common was that both were atheists.



Chaplain Moss contacted Goldberg after reading her reporting on atheism and faith. Goldberg then reached out to the prisoner and arranged phone interviews with him. For more than a year, this reporter spoke with the chaplain and the inmate and listened to recorded phone calls between them. Goldberg details the Hancock's history—growing up with an abusive father, his 2002 confrontation with two armed men who had been selling his girlfriend drugs, which he says led to his killing them, and his denial of God while in jail. She relates Moss’s own road to becoming a chaplain as an atheist. Goldberg traveled to Oklahoma and was there when Moss said his last goodbyes to his death-row friend as he was loaded onto a gurney where he would be given the lethal injection. Goldberg ends her the story driving away from the prison as Moss sat beside her, crying.

Investigative Reporting

 This year’s Investigative Reporting winner was ProPublica, for Jake Pearson’s  “Bedbugs, Rats and No Heat: How One Woman Endured a Decade of Neglect in New York’s Guardianship System.” By exposing the sad case of a woman left suffering in a dilapidated, unheated, rat-infested house, Pearson’s reporting illuminated the problems plaguing thousands of elderly and handicapped citizens whose care is supposed to be monitored by New York’s “guardianship” system and the courts.



Pearson also highlighted the fact that there is no law effectively regulating private companies that function as guardians. This failing, he writes, has allowed these companies to provide few services while collecting excessive fees. Pearson’s probe has prompted calls for reform by the New York City Council, the New York Legislature and the governor. For the first time, the administrative arm of the New York judicial system also has taken an active role in reforming guardianship, by appointing a special counsel and a statewide coordinating judge.

Business & Financial Reporting

 Investigations of all kinds were prominent among this year’s Silurian entries. The Medallion for Business & Financial Reporting goes to Claudia Irizarry Aponte and Alyssa Katz of THE CITY for “New York’s Fastest-Growing Union is Management’s Best Friend—and Some Workers Don’t Even Know They’re Members.”



Using measured and richly supported reporting, Irizarry Aponte and Katz unmasked an unmistakable grift—a union that is little more than a family business allegedly exploiting the low-wage workers it supposedly represents. The organization in question is the Home Healthcare Workers of America. THE CITY’s reporting short-circuited the outfit’s cynical efforts to build political influence. As our judges wrote, “This is local reporting at its best.”

Science & Health

 The Science & Health Medallion was awarded to yet another investigative piece—a two-year effort by Katherine Eban  of the health-science-and-medicine website STAT News. Eban looked into a controversial study at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York called the Living Brain Project. For its report, STAT used the Freedom of Information Act to get more than 3,500 pages of FDA, NIH and HHS reports, internal Mount Sinai documents, and interviews with more than 60 sources. Eban found that the Living Brain Project researchers made false claims about the safety of their procedure, which involved removing pieces of the brain of patients undergoing “deep brain stimulation” as treatment for Parkinson’s Disease and treatment-resistant depression. The work has continued with hundreds of patients even after the FDA wrote a critical report saying it was needlessly dangerous to patients. 


       STAT said its reporting “suggests the study fell into a regulatory gray zone, one in which the FDA determined that it either did not have jurisdiction or an obligation to formally share its concerns with Mount Sinai — making the Living Brain Project a cautionary tale about the limits of the regulatory system to police cutting-edge human research.”

Environmental Reporting

 The winner of the Medallion for Environmental Reporting, “Hazard NYC: Toxic Superfund Sites in the Age of Climate Change,” was authored by Samantha Maldonado of THE CITY. This ambitious four-part, multimedia examination of four badly contaminated Superfund sites in New York City explains how climate change, bureaucratic challenges and financial barriers are complicating the clean-up. Maldonado gives readers a series of visual essays paired with podcast episodes, allowing readers to zoom in on maps of the toxic sites, see the conditions there and hear directly from people who live and work in the injured communities, including Greenpoint and Gowanus.

Arts & Culture

We move to a very different New York locale to find the winner of the Medallion Award for Arts & Culture reporting. Christopher Maag of the New York Times tells the delightful tale of “How Two Wandering Cows Started a Culture War.” It seems that, in the normally placid rural town of Newfane, N.Y., a dispute arose between animal-sanctuary owner Tracy Murphy and cow-owner Scott Gregson. A couple of Gregson’s cows had wandered into Murphy’s sanctuary. When Gregson asked for them back, Ms. Murphy refused to return the bovines to an owner who might one day have them slaughtered. Gregson had her arrested, and people in the community quickly took sides. Some on Facebook called for Murphy to be lynched. Others called Gregson’s house with threats to rape and kill his children. When the case went to court, Murphy was escorted into the chamber, Maag writes, “chained at the wrist, waist and ankle.”



“This is a case of the world gone insane,’’ a lawyer for Murphy says. It’s a slice of life both sad and absurd, and Maag, with deep reporting and deft writing, captured it beautifully. Far from just a look at one small town, the judges noted that “this story has something to say about all of America.”

Sports Reporting & Commentary

 A different kind of cultural shift is happening in the sports world, where the notion of amateur sports is being buried in cash payments. The Medallion winner for Sports Reporting & Commentary, NJ.Com, looks closely at this topic in “Come Ninth Grade, I Plan to Get Paid,” by Kevin Armstrong. Through in-person reporting, public-records requests, timely tips, interviews, security-camera footage obtained from a source and court testimony, Armstrong profiled Student Athlete Academy, a half-baked, unaccredited, sports-oriented school that taught middle-schoolers to view themselves as “brands.” Armstrong’s reporting disclosed how this private, for-profit school—with an annual tuition ticket of $15,000—falsely advertised its accreditation status and skipped town twice after receiving cease-and-desist orders. The school’s owners also failed to conduct a background check on a trainer who had a cocaine charge on his record, was facing vehicular homicide charges at the time that the academy hired him and who, while employed, was accused of sexually harassing students.

Editorial / Public Service / Commentary

  In his Medallion-winning series for NorthJersey.com, “The First Amendment: Battered, Assaulted, Challenged,” Rob Miraldi gave his readers editorials of the highest order of public service. During the 2024 election year, Miraldi’s monthly column on our guaranteed freedoms of speech and the press combined knowledge, insight and style to show readers where they have lost a voice and how they must be vigilant to protect their free-speech rights. In plain English, Miraldi defined important issues, often missing from coverage of dark money, where wealthy people make unlimited political contributions that lead to “rule by the rich,” as he calls it. While the rich wind up with a say in American policy, the poor, who can’t play money politics, have little or no voice. “Once the fat cats own the government,” he warns, “the people are no longer in charge.” In a column about the absence of cameras in New York State courtrooms, Miraldi shows how citizens have lost access to information that could help them better evaluate public figures—people like Donald J. Trump. During Trump’s trial in April 2024, the future president “muttered and motioned” towards a potential juror, leading the judge to admonish him not to intimidate jurors. “I want to feel what it is like in the courtroom,” he writes, to judge if Trump “is really a crook.” Miraldi’s columns make us smarter about a treasured right that is slipping away.

People Profiles

 One of the more popular categories in the Silurians’ annual Excellence in Journalism competition is People Profiles. Alex Vadukul  of the New York Times wins this year for “Inside the Funeral Home for New York’s Luminaries.”

For a certain species of New Yorkers, a funeral at Frank E. Campbell has been a must for over a century. Celebrities like Judy Garland, Greta Garbo, John Lennon, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Ivana Trump—even the 1920s screen legend and heartthrob Rudolph Valentino—have been given their final farewells at this stately Upper East Side mortuary. But because of the discretion of its funeral directors, little was known about the funeral home itself and its colorful history. Alex Vadukul unlocked some of its secrets and lore in a meticulously researched, fun-to-read-profile of the funeral home that is as entertaining as it is eye-opening.

Minority Affairs Reporting

 When considering abused and neglected minorities, not everyone thinks of the disabled. So, it was a bold and unusual move when the editorial managers of The Record, aka NorthJersey.com, decided to assign reporter Gene Myers  full-time to reporting on New Jersey’s growing disabled population. His series “Living with Disability in New Jersey” wins the Medallion for best Minority Affairs Reporting. 



Myers, who himself lives with cerebral palsy, wrote powerful stories documenting the abuse and neglect of the disabled across the state. He wrote of parents unable to get help for their sometimes violent, adult autistic children, of the failure of the group home system where clients are frequently sexually and physically abused, and the general underfunding of programs to help parents care for their disabled kids. The judges found Myers’ reporting to be “revealing and full of both indignation and compassion.”

Photography

Photography awards in all categories—Breaking News, Feature News and Sports—were a hat trick for Long Island’s Newsday.



 In Breaking News Photography, Newsday’s James Carbone took the Medallion for “After the Flood.”   It is not every day that harrowing photos of flood victims show rescuers hauling fish, rather than stranded citizens. Carbone’s practically poetic entry captures the efforts to save the inhabitants of the Stony Brook Mill Pond after catastrophic rainfall on Long Island last August caused the pond’s dam to give way, allowing the pond’s water to drain almost entirely into the harbor.

 In Feature News Photography, Alejandra Villa Loarca  won a Medallion for “A Mother and Daughter’s Love,” a touching portrait of Stasia Ann Scocca and her daughter Sadie, 10, in their home in Mount Sinai in April 2024. Stasia and Sadie were both born with a rare genetic condition known as Holt-Oram Syndrome, which affects bone growth and can cause heart problems. We see Stasia teaching her daughter how to cope and function with short arms that result from the syndrome. It takes us to greater kindness and understanding. Villa Loarca also won the runner-up Merit award for a photo titled “Prodigy.”

 The Sports Photography Medallion was won by Thomas A. Ferrara  of Newsday for “Fan Interference,” a photo that captures the moment in the 2024 World Series when Yankee fans intentionally get in the way of Dodgers outfielder Mookie Betts as he tries to make a catch at the wall in right field during Game 4. The shot was perfectly timed.

Television/Video Reporting

 The Medallion-winner for television coverage of breaking news also was about the murder of Brian Thompson. NBC News’ investigative team of Jonathan Dienst, Tom Winter and Courtney Copenhagen was out front on much of this violent-crime story, producing six excellent reports over five days that covered the assassination and the pursuit of the alleged killer, Luigi Mangione, as well as the impact on the victim’s family and company. This was breaking-news television coverage at its best.

Radio/Audio Reporting

 As reported earlier, Bloomberg News took home the Medallion for Radio/Audio Reporting of Breaking News for “UnitedHealthcare CEO Gunned Down in Manhattan.” This winning entry included highlights of the first hour of coverage, followed by updates that aired in the first 24 hours after news of the cold-blooded murder broke, and was the work of anchors Tom Keene and Paul Sweeney and reporters Shelly Banjo and Katia Porzecanski.