2012 Toner Prize Honorable Mention for The Wall Street Journal
“Swing Nation”
From the judges: “The Wall Street Journal series is the year’s best example of door-to-door political reporting, letting the voters speak about issues and personalities, fears and hopes.”
The Stories: From Gerald F. Seib, Washington Bureau chief: “The inspiration was simple: To chronicle the forces that would mold the 2012 presidential election through the window of three key counties in three swing states.
To give the series proper scope and depth, The Wall Street Journal political team picked divergent counties in three very different states, and then returned to them again and again: Hamilton County in southwestern Ohio; Arapahoe County just outside Denver, Colorado; and Volusia County along Florida’s northern Atlantic Coast. All three counties were seen as pivotal bellwethers among politicos within their state, and all had played a role in tipping their states toward Barack Obama in 2008.
The result was a series of stories, ‘Swing Nation,’ that took Wall Street Journal readers on more than a dozen very personal, up-close strolls through the electoral landscape that shaped the presidential contest.
Two of the stories—the first and the last—served as bigger, thematic bookends to guide readers at the start and finish of a tumultuous presidential race.
The stories in between offered detailed and colorful explorations of the many political and economic dramas washing through the various counties: the explosive mortgage meltdown in Volusia; unease over President Obama’s populist message among well-off voters in Arapahoe; the unpredictable aftermath of an anti-union fight in Hamilton.
By stepping off the campaign trail, and leaving the candidates behind, the Journal team engaged in the sort of door-to-door, neighborhood-to-neighborhood reporting that is increasingly rare in today’s political journalism.
The series generated thousands of comments from readers and was closely followed by the presidential campaigns and by lawmakers and community leaders in the states covered.”
The Reporters:
Douglas Belkin covers higher education for The Wall Street Journal. He has worked since 2007 in The Journal’s Chicago bureau, where he has covered Canada, national politics and general news. Prior to joining The Journal, Belkin was a reporter and bureau chief at The Boston Globe, where he was part of a team that won the 2004 American Society of News Editors prize for breaking news reporting. Belkin has a bachelor’s degree from Colby College in Maine.
Arian Campo-Flores is a reporter in Miami and part of the Atlanta bureau of The Wall Street Journal. He joined The Wall Street Journal in 2011 and covers Florida, the Southeast and the Caribbean, as well as the cruise industry. From 2002 to 2011, Campo-Flores was the Miami bureau chief for Newsweek magazine, covering the Southeast. From 2000 to 2002, he was the New York correspondent for Newsweek. He is a native of Washington, D.C., and holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Campo-Flores lives in Miami with his wife, Casey Woods, and their three sons.
Neil King covers national politics for The Wall Street Journal. Since 1999, he has worked in The Journal’s Washington bureau, where he has also covered foreign policy, intelligence, terrorism, international trade and the oil industry. In the 1990s, King spent nearly seven years as a Journal correspondent in Europe, first in Prague and later in Brussels. In 2002, King shared the Pulitzer Prize for The Journal’s coverage of the Sept. 11, 2011, attacks, and he was part of a reporting team that won the 2012 Loeb Award for Online Enterprise. He earned a master’s degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Chicago and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Columbia University in New York.
Jack Nicas is a reporter in the Chicago bureau of The Wall Street Journal, where he covers aviation and national news out of the Midwest. Before joining The Journal in 2011, Nicas wrote for The Boston Globe and the St. Petersburg Times in Tampa, Fla., from 2009 to 2011. Born in Worcester, Mass., Nicas holds a bachelor’s degree from Boston University. He lives in Chicago.
Colleen McCain Nelson covers the White House for The Wall Street Journal. She spent 2012 on the campaign trail, covering Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum and traveling to an assortment of swing states to write enterprise stories. Before joining the Journal in 2012, Nelson worked almost 12 years at The Dallas Morning News. There, she wrote about local, state and national politics as a reporter and, later, as an editorial writer and a political columnist. In 2010, Nelson and two colleagues shared the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. Nelson also won the Carmage Walls Commentary Prize and several Texas APME awards. Ms. Nelson is a Phi Beta Kappa of the University of Kansas, with a bachelor’s degree in journalism.
Stephanie Simon is now the national education writer for Reuters. She previously spent four years covering national news for The Wall Street Journal from the Denver bureau. Simon began her career in Moscow covering Russian politics for the Los Angeles Times and then joined that paper’s national staff, where she covered the Midwest with a focus on religion. Simon won the 2012 national beat reporting award from the Education Writers Association. She has a bachelor’s degree in English from Yale University.
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