2008 Oakes Award Bios
Photo/Rebecca Castillo
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel received the 2008 John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism for its series “Chemical Fallout.”
Meg Kissinger is the Journal Sentinel's investigative reporter focusing on health care. She and Susanne Rust have just been named as winners of the 2008 George Polk Award for Environmental Reporting for their yearlong series on the government’s failure to monitor dangerous chemicals. Kissinger, Rust and Cary Spivak won the 2007 Sigma Delta Chi award and the Society of American Business Writers and Editors award for another series on dangerous chemicals in household products. Kissinger was a finalist for the 2007 Selden Ring and Investigative Reporter and Editor awards for her reports on the filthy and dangerous housing conditions in Milwaukee County for people with mental illness. That series won the Mental Health America Award for best news reporting. In her 25 years in the newsroom, Kissinger has written about abuses in the nursing home industry, the scam of the door-to-door magazine sales industry and the travails of an oncologist who unwittingly discovered his own end-stage cancer. Kissinger has received other awards from the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors, the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Wisconsin Newspaper Association. She graduated from DePauw University with a degree in political science. She worked at the Watertown N.Y., Daily Times and the Cincinnati Post before joining the Milwaukee Journal in 1983 as the legal affairs reporter.
Susanne Rust is a science reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. In her five years at the paper she has trekked through the hills of Rwanda to cover stories on civil engineering and AIDS; hacked through the dense foliage of a Ugandan rain forest in search of mountain gorillas; poked around Scotland’s Roslin Institute looking for clones; and written about eco-friendly agriculture in Costa Rica. In 2008, Rust and two of her colleagues from the Journal Sentinel, received national recognition for their work on chemicals and government regulation, including a Sigma Delta Chi award for non-deadline reporting and the Society of American Business Writers and Editors for an outstanding project. In 2009, Rust and Meg Kissinger received the George Polk award for environmental reporting. The team was also featured on Bill Moyer’s "Journal" in May 2008, in a 30-minute episode of the documentary show, "Exposé," which features the work of investigative journalists. Rust has received awards for her reporting on stem cells, including an Inland Press Association award for explanatory writing. Before joining the Journal Sentinel, Rust pursued a doctorate in biological anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she studied primate communication, evolution and ecology.
Cary Spivak is the Journal Sentinel's investigative reporter focusing on business. Before joining the Watchdog Team as an investigative reporter focusing on business, Spivak was the co-author of the Spivak & Bice column. Prior to launching the column in 1998 with Daniel Bice, Spivak worked on the business desk at the Journal Sentinel as an investigative reporter specializing in casino gaming, the legal industry and financial fraud. Before that, Spivak worked for several years on the city desk at the Milwaukee Sentinel. He was hired by the Sentinel in 1987. During his 30-year career, he has worked on a variety of investigations involving business, politics and law enforcement. Subjects he has probed include a now-disbarred bankruptcy lawyer who pocketed thousands of dollars in fees without doing any work for his destitute clients; illegal property flipping schemes and securities fraud. In 2007 he was part of a three-person reporting team that won national awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. The team was honored for its series "Chemical Fallout."
The Associated Press (AP) won an honorable mention for its investigative series, “PharmaWater,” which explored how America’s drinking water is being contaminated with trace concentrations of a multitude of pharmaceuticals.
Jeff Donn is a Boston-based member of the National Investigative Team of The Associated Press. Early in his career, he was a writer, photographer and managing editor at weekly and daily newspapers. Since 1985, he has served as an AP newsman, foreign-desk editor, regional correspondent, and national feature and medical writer. He helped cover the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, U.S. wars with Iraq, the domestic terrorist attacks of September 2001, Enron’s bankruptcy, the Washington-area sniper attacks of 2002, NASA’s space shuttle program, and Hurricane Katrina. His news projects include investigations of trace drugs in American drinking water, the FBI’s partnership with violent informants, and pricing abuses in the energy market. He holds a bachelor’s from Dartmouth College and doctorate in French literature from Princeton University.
Martha Mendoza is a National Writer for the Associated Press whose investigative reports have won numerous awards and prompted Congressional hearings, Pentagon investigations and White House responses. She won a 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting as part of a team that revealed, with extensive documentation, the decades-old secret of how American soldiers early in the Korean War killed hundreds of civilians at the No Gun Ri bridge. She won numerous other prestigious awards as well for the project. Mendoza was a 2007 Ferris Professor at Princeton University and a 2001 Knight Fellow at Stanford University. She teaches a newswriting class and guest lectures regularly at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Justin Pritchard's work as a reporter on the National Investigative Team at the Associated Press has focused on pharmaceutical pollution in the nation's water, food safety and national politics. Other writing and editing assignments for AP have included Hurricane Katrina, the Olympics and World Cup. In 2004, he won a George Polk Award for his investigation that detailed disproportionate on-the-job death rates among Mexican-born workers in the U.S. Prior to joining AP in 2000, Pritchard reported from Cuba and Southeast Asia, and covered Congress for the Washington Post Company. He graduated magna cum laude from Brown University with a B.A. in history.