Alums and faculty named finalists for Gerald Loeb Awards for business reporting

Clockwise from top left: Sarah Cahlan, John Harden, Nazmul Ahasan, Jeremy C.F. Lin, Caitlin Esch and Robin Urevich.

Five UC Berkeley Journalism alumni and one of our multimedia lecturers are among the finalists for the 2024 Gerald Loeb Awards for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism.

Sarah Cahlan (’19) and multimedia Lecturer John Harden were part of The Washington Post team named as finalists in the Feature Category for “American Icon,” a series of stories about the AR-15, the rifle most commonly used in the nation’s deadliest mass shootings.

Robin Urevich (’09) is a finalist in the Local Category for her investigation “Checked Out: How L.A. Failed to Stop Landlords from Turning Low-Cost Housing into Tourist Hotels,” for Capital & Main and ProPublica.

Caitlin Esch (’10) is a finalist in the Audio Category for “The Uncertain Hour, Season 6: The Welfare-to-Work Industrial Complex” for Marketplace/American Public Media and APM Research Lab. The series takes an up-close look at the welfare-to-work industrial complex, and some of the multimillion-dollar for-profit companies that run many welfare offices around the country.

Jeremy C.F. Lin (’16) is a finalist in the Visual Storytelling Category for “Power Plays,” a yearlong Bloomberg News investigation that revealed how electricity consumers have been hit with surprise extra costs thanks to grid shortcomings, policy loopholes and maneuvers by companies with strong market power.

Nazmul Ahasan (’23) is a finalist in the Local Category for “Toxic Texas Air” for Public Health Watch. “Toxic Texas Air” revealed that state environmental regulators knew about, but failed to stop, high benzene emissions in the majority-Latino community of Channelview, Texas, for two decades. The stories in 2023 exposed serial polluters and examined public health threats in the petrochemical industry.

The winners will be announced on October 10 in New York City.

The Gerald Loeb Awards are the most prestigious honor in business journalism in the United States. They were established in 1957 by the late Gerald Loeb, a founding partner of E.F. Hutton. Loeb had a deep appreciation for the significant role that journalists fulfill in society and created the awards to encourage and support reporting on business and finance that will inform and protect both the private investor and the public.Loeb Awards finalists were selected from 491 entries, representing the work of over 200 journalists across local, regional, national and global media outlets in various formats.