Announcement from Social Issues Editor Annys Shin and Senior National Investigations Editor Peter Wallsten:
The Post has been recognized with two wins at this year’s National Press Foundation Awards.
Tara Bahrampour has won the National Press Foundation’s inaugural AARP Award for Excellence in Journalism on Aging, large category. Tara is The Post’s first reporter dedicated to aging. Her coverage is broad and deep, including everything from changing demographics to health to lifestyle to intimate narratives. The three stories the AARP Award recognized offer a glimpse of her range as a journalist. “In middle age, they realized they were trans: ‘A lightbulb went off,” was part of a series of stories that The Post did based on the results of our ground-breaking poll of transgender Americans. It was the first non-governmental survey of that population using randomized sampling. One of the survey’s most interesting findings was the higher proportion of respondents over age 50 who said they were still closeted. Tara set out to talk to many of them and tell their stories. She captured their struggles, their joys and their regrets in her piece with nuance and clarity. Zeitgeist stories are also one of Tara’s specialties. In “Americans over 50 are doing extreme sports their grandparents never imagined,” she explores the growing number of older Americans who take on nontraditional, highly demanding sports. And in, “Biden turns 80 and joins growing ranks of octogenarians who still work,” she used the president’s birthday as a vehicle to explore the aging workforce and delved into some of the unique characteristics of older workers. All three stories explore how older Americans are choosing to live their lives in 2023. NPF judges praised Bahrampour’s work for avoiding stereotyping and “othering” older adults in America. “In a strong field, this series stood out for an honest look at what aging can be like as seniors push against limitations for fuller lives,” said NPF judges.
“The Blast Effect,” a groundbreaking story from our “American Icon” series examining the rise of the AR-15, won the National Press Foundation’s 2023 Innovative Storytelling Award. This is the fifth time The Post has won the award since it was created in 2015. In this ground-breaking piece, Post staff combined deep, revelatory reporting with gripping animations and intricate design to provide an unflinching yet respectful portrayal how bullets fired by AR-15s decimate human bodies. NPF judges noted that for all they’ve read about mass shootings, the story made it possible to “just look and understand.” The judges also took note of the feature at the bottom of the piece comparing the number of people killed in actual mass shootings in the number of minutes readers had spent scrolling the page. “It had meaning that you wouldn’t have had” in a traditional format, they said.
