Rosebud Winner: ProPublica’s Year-long Series on US Oversight of Generic Drugs

JUNE 2026 - Its first story on the subject was published a year ago this week, and since then nonprofit investigative news service ProPublica has deployed more than a dozen reporters to address regulation of generic drugs in the US. The bottom line from all that work: The marketplace of generic medications has lax oversight, leading to risks for consumers that have been widely ignored. ProPublica's first story ran June 17, 2025, and continued through the year; in December the outfit released a database for anyone to learn where their generic drugs are manufactured. More stories appeared in the first half of this year. The scope of the project is rare in today's resource-starved world of investigative journalism. Among the reporters who undertook the yearlong project: Debbie Cenziper, Megan Rose, Brandon Roberts, Ruth Talbot, Nick McMillan, Irena Hwang, and more who contributed from the Medill Investigative Lab. The series was a finalist for a 2025 Pulitzer Prize. https://www.propublica.org/article/rx-inspector-prescription-drug-lookup https://www.propublica.org/series/rx-roulette

Rosebud Winner: A “Cattle Empire Ponzi Scheme” Laid Out by Two WSJ Reporters

JUNE 2026 - Two WSJ reporters - one based in London - earlier this month did a post-mortem on the sad tale of a Kentucky man who grossly overstated the size of his far-flung cattle herds, getting into hock so deep that he committed suicide when his financial house of cards began to collapse. Part of the story involves Holland-based Rabo Bank, which extended tens of millions of dollars in credit to the man, Brian McClain. In early 2023 McClain shot himself when sheriff's deputies were about to arrest him for writing bad checks. Stories such as this are not terribly difficult to report - the dead guy at the center of the story can't answer for his actions, and there's a long document trail after three years of a bankruptcy process. But is is laid out clearly, and not too breathlessly, while explaining the culture of long-term trust between lenders and cattle ranchers, who report their herd numbers as bank collateral pretty much on a handshake. Moreover, several local investors got deceived as well by what turned out to be a Ponzi scheme. One of the reporters, Nebraska native Patrick Thomas, writes about "agriculture and America's...

Rosebud Winner: The Guardian’s Tom Phillips Reports from a Chaotic Caracas

MAY 2026 - The Guardian's Tom Phillips went down to Caracas and scoped out the deal-making free-for-all in the lobby of the Marriott Hotel there, and the chaotic picture he paints is not exactly shocking. The report is also a reminder that we are getting precious little information about post-Maduro Venezuela, even while the old Chavista regime remains in power. The UK-based Guardian has done an admirable job in recent years stepping into the breach of foreign coverage for US readers - in Europe, South America and the Middle East. Phillips's ongoing coverage in Caracas is a good example of that. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/20/venezuela-hotel-us-takeover https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/05/venezuela-opposition-nicolas-maduro-democracy

Rosebud Winner: David Ignatius Offers a Relatively Optimistic Outlook on the US’s Role in The World

MAY 2026 - David Ignatius wrote a colorful essay pointing out that reports of America's death are, up to now at least, greatly exaggerated - and that China's ascent is not guaranteed. "America is Falling Uphill" reads the head of Ignatius's May 21 column. America is weirdly resilient. Covid-19 looked like a crippling problem, but China took a harder hit than the United States. Border policy was a mess under Biden, but the public now seems unhappier about Trump’s crackdown than about illegal immigration. And finally, there’s the ever-expanding balloon of the U.S. economy. Despite inflationary tax and tariff policies, it keeps rolling along. The AI companies are so advanced they scare themselves. All the harbingers of American decline are present, to be sure. Trump himself is a walking symbol of arrogance and corruption that people once would have called “un-American.” But there’s a mysterious self-correcting mechanism at work. Every poll you read says that despite Trump’s electoral machinations, he’s still likely to lose the House of Representatives in November. Trump continues to try to undermine the Federal Reserve’s independence...