Won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2013 for “The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You’ve Never Heard Of.” Our InsideClimate News team of reporters, Elizabeth McGowan, Lisa Song and David Hasemyer won for what the judges called “rigorous reports on flawed regulation of the nation’s oil pipelines, focusing on potential ecological dangers posed by diluted bitumen (or “dilbit”), a controversial form of oil.” This cautionary, investigative tale explores the repercussions of Canada-based Enbridge spilling a million barrels of diluted bitumen into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River.
The e-book version of “The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You’ve Never Heard Of” won the Rachel Carson Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists in 2013.
The “Dilbit Disaster” series won the James Aronson Award for social justice reporting presented by Hunter College in NYC and a digital media reporting award from the Deadline Club, the New York Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists; an honorable mention in the John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Reporting presented at Columbia University; and was a Scripps Howard Foundation Award finalist.
Won second place in Cleveland Press Club Ohio Excellence in Journalism Awards contest in the public service/investigative category for two stories published by Crain Communications in 2007 about the aftermath of Sept. 11; one story focused on the compromised health of cleanup workers and the other on the environmental complications associated with razing the Deutsche Bank building near the Twin Towers site.
Won numerous explanatory writing/reporting awards from the Wisconsin Newspaper Association, the Milwaukee Press Club, the American Heart Association and the Wisconsin Association of School Boards while a general assignment/beat and feature writer for The Janesville Gazette and then for the Racine Journal Times in the 1990s.