Two of the reporters named finalists in the 61st annual National Magazine Awards — widely considered one of the top industry prizes for narrative journalists — are graduates of UC Berkeley Journalism.
Established in 1966, the awards are sponsored by the American Society of Magazine Editors in association with the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Originally limited to honoring work published in print magazines, since 2009, the awards also recognize magazine storytelling published in any medium, from video to podcasting.
Rachel de Leon (’14) is a finalist in the best Profile Writing category for “The Unflinching Courage of Taylor Cadle,” in Mother Jones. It explores how a 12-year-old girl in Florida was raped by her adoptive father, then wrongly charged for lying about it by the County Sheriff’s Office. The investigation became one of Mother Jones’ top-read stories of the year.
Brett Murphy (‘16) is a finalist in the Reporting category for three articles investigating the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and its consequences around the world for ProPublica: “Trump Officials Celebrated With Cake After Slashing Aid. Then People Died of Cholera,” “Inside the Trump Administration’s Man-Made Hunger Crisis,” and “The Summer of Starvation: Amid Trump’s Foreign Aid Cuts, a Mother Struggles to Keep Her Sons Alive.”
Both of them have received other top industry recognition from their peers: from Pulitzer Prize wins to Emmy wins. Murphy recently won his third Polk Award in the international reporting category for the same series.
de Leon is best known as a reporter and producer for TV and documentaries at Reveal. She’s worked as a videographer and producer for investigations about caregiver wage theft, fatal accidents at Amazon warehouses, and modern-day redlining.
In 2018, she began researching cases of police arresting and charging young people with lying about rape, despite incomplete investigations and the use of questionable interrogation tactics. This became the Netflix original documentary “Victim/Suspect,” which was released in 2023. The subject matter has since continued as a series.
Each National Magazine Award winner receives a copper “Ellie,” modeled on the symbol of the awards, Alexander Calderʼs 1942 stabile “Elephant Walking”.
In 2023, Murphy revealed how a set of politically connected billionaires provided lavish gifts and travel to Supreme Court justices over many years. Those stories won the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for public service. He was a Pulitzer finalist just years after finishing his graduate studies at UC Berkeley for a nine-part series started as his master’s project when he was a student. Murphy worked with both editors at the Investigative Reporting Program and New Media faculty. He later expanded the story for USA Today.
de Leon has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from California State University, Northridge. Murphy studied nonfiction writing at the University of Pittsburgh.
“Being named a finalist for a National Magazine Award is a remarkable and deserved achievement by Rachel and Brett for the reporting they did on sexual assault survivors and the dismantling of USAID,” said Michael D. Bolden, dean of UC Berkeley Journalism.
As many as 250 magazines and websites enter the awards every year, submitting 1,000-plus entries in 18 categories. This year, more than 70 media organizations are finalists. Nineteen publications received multiple nominations, led by New York Magazine with nine and The New Yorker with five. The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, ProPublica, Texas Monthly and WIRED each got four nominations. Bloomberg News and NationalGeographic both got three nominations.
The finalists will be honored — and the winners announced — at the presentation of the National Magazine Awards in New York City on Tuesday, May 19.
