Finalists announced in 2015 Mirror Awards competition

The Newhouse School at Syracuse University today announced the finalists in the 2015 Mirror Awards competition honoring excellence in media industry reporting. Winners will be announced at an awards ceremony June 11, in New York City.

The finalists, chosen from a pool of more than 300 entries by a group of journalists and journalism educators, are:

Best Commentary

• “Of candidates and strip clubs” by Matt Bai (Yahoo)
• “What a Cleveland news outlet should learn from its flawed Tamir Rice coverage” by Anna Clark (Columbia Journalism Review)
• “Jill Abramson’s Firing Was About Gender. And Also Not About Gender.” by Rebecca Traister (The New Republic)
• “Moral Hazard” by Yang Xiao (Nieman Reports)
• “Biggest stories of 2014 didn’t need traditional news outlets” by David Zurawik (The Baltimore Sun)

Best Profile

• “Can Jill Soloway Do Justice to the Trans Movement?” by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (The New York Times Magazine)
• “How to Lose $100 Million: The undoing of Tina Brown” by Luke O’Brien (Politico)
• “The Pierre Omidyar Insurgency” by Andrew Rice (New York magazine)
• “What Is Hillary Clinton Afraid Of?” by Glenn Thrush, Maggie Haberman (Politico)
• “Kara Swisher Is Silicon Valley’s Most Feared and Well-Liked Journalist. How Does That Work?” by Benjamin Wallace (New York magazine)

Best Single Article – Digital Media

• “Where Are the Women? Why we need more female newsroom leaders” by Anna Griffin (Nieman Reports)
• “Inside the Buzz-Fueled Media Startups Battling for Your Attention” by Mat Honan (Wired)
• “A tragic end to storytelling” by Raksha Kumar (The Hindu)
• “Inside the Collapse of The New Republic” by Ryan Lizza (The New Yorker)
• “Bonfire of the Inanities” by Jacqui Shine (The Awl)

Best Single Article – Traditional/Legacy Media

• “Ultimate Risk” by Genevieve Belmaker (Quill)
• “Hollywood’s Big-Money YouTube Hit Factory” by Felix Gillette (Business Week)
• “Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet” by Amanda Hess (Pacific Standard)
• “Command and Control: The state of journalism in China, 25 years after Tiananmen” by Paul Mooney (Nieman Reports)
• “The Adelson Effect” by Robert Slater, Wesley G. Pippert (Moment)
• “Read It and Reap” by Alec Wilkinson (The New Yorker)

Best Single Story – Radio, Television, Cable or Online Broadcast Media

• “OTM Goes Inside Washington” by Bob Garfield, Katya Rodgers (On The Media)
• “The Anatomy of Six Shootings” by Brooke Gladstone, Katya Rodgers (On The Media)
• “A Fragile Trust: Plagiarism, Power and Jayson Blair at The New York Times” by Samantha Grant – This documentary is accompanied by a web browser-based interactive video game, Decisions on Deadline, which simulates the ethical decisions that journalists make every day.
• “Local Media Question Pittsfield’s Press Protocol” by Jim Levulis ’13 (WAMC Northeast Public Radio)

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

• “The Wolf of Sesame Street: Revealing the secret corruption inside PBS’s news division” by David Sirota (PandoDaily)
• “Why the music industry is trying – and failing – to crush Pandora” by John McDuling (Quartz)
• “The Snowden Saga: A Shadowland of Secrets and Light” by Bryan Burrough, Sarah Ellison, Suzanna Andrews (Vanity Fair)
• “What Happened When Marissa Mayer Tried to Be Steve Jobs” by Nicholas Carlson (The New York Times Magazine)
• “He Bullies Kids and Calls It News” by Brandy Zadrozny (The Daily Beast)

An awards ceremony will be held Thursday, June 11, from 11:45 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., at Cipriani 42nd Street, 110 E. 42nd St., New York City. Register online at mirrorwards.com. Follow on Twitter at #Mirrors15.

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 ticket and table sales for the ceremony, contact Amanda Griffin at 315.443.7982 or mirror@syr.edu. For media inquiries, contact Wendy Loughlin at 315.443.2785 or wsloughl@syr.edu.