At its annual dinner on Saturday, the White House Correspondents’ Association will present AHCJ member and Seattle Times reporter Michael Berens with the Edgar A. Poe Award and $2,500. The award “honors excellence in news coverage of subjects and events of significant national or regional importance to the American people.”
Berens earned the prize for his “Seniors for Sale” series, which focused on Washington State’s booming adult home industry and the dangers of the regulatory gray area it often seems to fall into.
According to the WHCA release, “the judges were impressed by the depth of reporting and the ability to tell a highly charged story with clarity.”
“Michael Berens’ stories not only revealed a systemic failure in the health care system, but led to a shake-up of the agency involved, regulatory changes to improve oversight and accountability and landed some caregivers in jail,” said the judges.
This is the second Poe Award for Berens; he shared the first in 2009 with Ken Armstrong for their investigation into MRSA in Washington hospitals.
Berens won first place in the metro category of the Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism for the series. As mentioned in past posts, we’ve featured quite a bit of the series here on Covering Health, and here are a few posts to help you catch up on Berens’ award-winning work:
