Newhouse School Announces Finalists in 2023 Mirror Awards Competition

Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications today announced the finalists in the 2023 Mirror Awards competition honoring excellence in media industry reporting. Winners will be announced June 12 at an awards ceremony in New York City.

The finalists, selected by a group of journalists and journalism educators, are:

Best Single Article/Story

• Jon Allsop, “The Everything Virus” – Columbia Journalism Review
• Paul Farhi, “‘A newspaper vanished from the internet. Did someone pay to kill it?’” – The Washington Post
• Reniqua Allen-Lamphere, “Her Name Was Shirley” (PDF) – Esquire and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project
• Layla A. Jones, “Lights. Camera. Crime. How a Philly-born brand of TV news harmed Black America.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer

Best Profile

• Timothy McLaughlin, “The Tech Site That Took On China’s Surveillance State” (PDF) – The Atlantic
• Sam Adler-Bell, “The Pandemic Interpreter” (PDF) – New York Magazine
• Joe Pompeo, “Far From the Maddow Crowd” (PDF) – Vanity Fair

Best Commentary

• Gregg Gonsalves, “Media Malpractice in Covid Coverage” (PDF) – The Nation
  • “Laughing Ourselves to Death at the Gridiron Dinner”
  • “No, Joe Biden, the Pandemic Is Not Over”
  • “The Death Eaters: Covid in the Liberal Imagination”
• Carrie Kaufman, “Voodoo Journalism” (PDF) -You’re Overthinking It
• Michael Hiltzik, “Column: How the decline of local news exposes the public to lies and corruption” – Los Angeles Times
• Erik Wemple, “Commentary on media issues” – The Washington Post
  • “’Calm down,’ libs! A look back at select pieces of Roe commentary”
  • “James Bennet was right”
  • “News outlets stand by their midterm debacle”
    • Paywall username: wemple
    • Paywall password: wemple

John M. Higgins Award for Best In-Depth/Enterprise Reporting

• Katie Thornton, “The Divided Dial”
  • Episode 1 – “The True Believers”
  • Episode 3 – “The Liberal Bias Boogeyman”
  • Episode 4 – “From The Extreme to The Mainstream”
• Rob Davis, “Publishing Prejudice” (PDF) – The Oregonian/OregonLive
• Sheelah Kolhatkar, “The Perils of Pornhub”- The New Yorker
• Nicholas Confessore and Karen Yourish, “Tucker Carlson’s America” – The New York Times
  • “How Tucker Carlson Stoked White Fear to Conquer Cable” (PDF)
  • “How Tucker Carlson Reshaped Fox News – and Became Trump’s Heir” (PDF)
  • “Inside the Apocalyptic Worldview of ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’”

Special Topic Category for 2023 – Best Story on Media Coverage of the War in Ukraine

• Masha Gessen, “Masha Gessen on the War in Ukraine” – The New Yorker
  • “Russia’s Last Independent TV Channel Covers the Invasion of Ukraine”
  • “The War That Russians Do Not See”
  • “Inside Putin’s Propaganda Machine”
• Paul Mozur, Adam Satariano, Aaron Krolik, Neil MacFarquhar, Steven Lee Myers and Stuart A. Thompson, “Russia’s Disinformation Machine” – The New York Times
  • “An Alternate Reality: How Russia’s State TV Spins the Ukraine War” (PDF)
  • “What Russians See in the News: A War Over Western Plans to Subjugate Them” (PDF)
  • “Truth Is Another Front in Putin’s War” (PDF)
• Molly Schwartz, “Russian TV’s Favorite American Pundit” – On the Media
  • “The Russian TV’s Favorite American Pundit”
  • “Russia’s War”
  • “Ukraine’s Fight”
• Elahe Izadi, Sarah Ellison and Travis M. Andrews, “How Russia and the West covered the war in Ukraine” (PDF) – The Washington Post
  • “Russia’s independent media, long under siege, teeters under new Putin crackdown”
  • “This is how journalists figure out if all those Ukraine videos are real”
  • “‘They seem so like us’: In depicting Ukraine’s plight, some in media use offensive comparisons”

About the Mirror Awards

The Mirror Awards are the most important awards for recognizing excellence in media industry reporting. Established by the Newhouse School in 2006, the awards honor the reporters, editors and teams of writers who hold a mirror to their own industry for the public’s benefit. For information about the awards, visit newhouse.syr.edu/mirrorawards or email mirrorawards@syr.edu.