2024 Student Journalism Winner

About the Winners:

Using a trove of long-secret documents that were finally recently released, Alex Walters, Owen McCarthy and Theo Scheer created the fullest account to date of the Larry Nassar crisis from inside the institution responding to it. With that, they created a revelatory new lens by which to view Michigan State University’s administration, exposing the shadowy tactics a university can use when a reputational disaster looms. 

“Doing so required an enormous effort, as we had to both review a gargantuan sum of material and then distill our understanding of it into something our readers could really digest,” the three journalists explained. 

Comments From the Judges:

“The State News reporters painstakingly pored through thousands of documents that no other outlet had the patience or determination to examine, discovered damning new information and presented it to the public in digestible, easy-to-understand chunks. It was a Herculean effort executed flawlessly.”

“This is an impressive entry on many levels. My hat is off to these students for quickly organizing an effort to comb through a huge trove of documents that were released in a way that officials would hope would make it so hard to search and read that it would stay out of public view. And the reporters worked quickly amid their usual classes and other work to get a series of impactful articles out. I saw evidence of extra reporting beyond just the documents as well.”

Photo credit: Audrey Richardson/The State News; Alex Walters/The State News