NECIR
One of NECIR's 2014 Publick Occurrences Award plaques
The New England Center for Investigative Reporting has won highest honors from the New England Newspaper & Press Association for stories on faulty prenatal testing and homeowner debt.
The 2015 awards, to be presented Oct. 8, will go to the Center’s science reporter, Beth Daley, and Jenifer McKim, who covers social justice issues.
“These award-winning stories by Beth and Jenifer reflect the core mission of NECIR—to hold the powerful accountable and impact change where change is necessary,” said Joe Bergantino, NECIR executive director and co-founder. “We appreciate and value this important affirmation of the quality of our work.”
Daley’s nine-month investigation — “Oversold prenatal tests spur some to choose abortion” — uncovered the fallibility of a new generation of prenatal screening tests. Some women elect to terminate pregnancies based on these tests without understanding that positive results may be wrong more than 50 percent of the time, Daley reported.
The story is part of an ongoing series Daley is pursuing on the use of unregulated genetic tests in the growing field of personalized medicine. The prenatal testing story was published in the Boston Sunday Globe and by NECIR on Dec. 14, 2014. Daley, and contributing interns Samantha Costanzo, John Hilliard, Shan Wang and Andrea Keklak, also won two 2015 national health reporting awards for their work in this area.
McKim, whose Publick Occurrences award is the second in two years, won for two reports on homeowner debt which raised public awareness of growing debt problems disproportionately affecting lower income communities and the elderly.
“Homeowners sold out by cities,” by McKim and contributing intern Andrea D'Eramo, focused on the burst of foreclosure activity in Massachusetts Land Court stemming from the sale of municipal tax liens to private investors. The story showed the risks to troubled homeowners, particularly the elderly and disabled, who faced foreclosure because of their failure to pay even minimal tax bills. It was published by NECIR as well as in the Boston Globe, The Telegram & Gazette (Worcester), the Eagle-Tribune (Lawrence) and the The Standard-Times (New Bedford).
In “Foreclosure echo,” a four-month investigation that was published in the Sunday Boston Globe and by NECIR, McKim and contributing intern Jess Aloe examined a little-known but important national issue affecting thousands of former homeowners who purchased mortgage insurance only to discover, too late, that the insurance covered their lender and not them, personally.
The Publick Occurrences awards were created in 1990 to mark the 300th anniversary of the founding of Publick Occurences, the first newspaper published in America that was quickly suppressed by the royal governor days later. The awards are given by the New England Newspaper & Press Association, the professional trade organization for newspapers in the six New England states: Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine and Rhode Island.
The New England Center for Investigative Reporting is a nonprofit news center housed at Boston University and WGBH public radio/TV.