The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel was named the winner of a prestigious Gerald Loeb Award for local reporting for coverage of landlord-tenant issues.
The stories, published in 2023, included a deep look at landlords that are among the most prolific evictors of tenants and an investigation of Vinebrook Homes Trust, a multibillion-dollar private equity firm that quietly bought about 1,000 single-family homes in the city before experiencing financial trouble.
The Loeb award is sometimes referred to as the “Pulitzer Prize of business reporting.” The honor was announced Thursday night, Oct. 10, 2024, at an event in New York City.
The package of Journal Sentinel stories was written by reporters Daphne Chen, Cary Spivak and Genevieve Redsten. The nonprofit Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and NNS reporter PrincessSafiya Byers collaborated on the Vinebrook report. For the Vinebrook coverage, the Journal Sentinel and Neighborhood News Service received support from the Poynter Institute through funding from the Omidyar Network.
Other finalists in the Loeb local news category were Public Health Watch and a collaboration between Capital & Main and ProPublica.
“This award underlines what can happen when skilled, committed journalists identify a problem, dig deep to understand it and then work together to share what they find with the community,” said Greg Borowski, executive editor of the Journal Sentinel. “It’s a tribute to what happens when you put the community at the center of all that you do.”
The Gerald Loeb Awards were established in 1957 by the late Gerald Loeb, a founding partner of E.F. Hutton. Loeb created the awards to encourage and support reporting on business and finance that would inform and protect the private investor and the general public. The awards are administered by the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
“This project represents what happens when you unleash the powers of partnership and focus on serving readers,” said Ron Smith, executive director of the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service. “Instead of competing, this collaboration drew on the strengths of both newsrooms to collectively inform Milwaukee residents.”
Last year, a separate article focused on landlords — in this case, The Landlord & the Tenant, a narrative story about what happened to each after a fatal fire — was a Loeb finalist, in the explanatory category. It was published by the Journal Sentinel in partnership with ProPublica, a national nonprofit newsroom.
Other Journal Sentinel stories that have been finalists or winners in recent years include an investigation into security issues at hospital parking structures, an examination of the challenges facing the state’s dairy industry, a look at medical errors that go hidden from the public, a probe into the death of an amateur kickboxer and a piece exposing deadly flaws in the nation’s newborn screening program.
