2012 Toner Prize to Molly Ball of The Atlantic
From the judges: “Ms. Ball’s reporting on the 2012 presidential campaign was the most impressive I have read all year. She wrote with compelling authority and reported with her eyes ears and feet. She deftly made herself a surrogate for her readers in each of her stories.”
The Stories: From Garance Franke-Ruta, Senior Editor & Politics Channel Editor, The Atlantic: “I believe these stories, taken from a year’s worth of her online campaign coverage, demonstrate, in their breadth and range, depth and detail, the high standards and originality of vision shown by the late Robin Toner.
When I first met Molly in 2011, she described herself as “a completist.” Her natural instinct for thoroughness in reporting and writing gave her stories a tucked in quality unusual in the helter-skelter world of online media. It’s an instinct has made her stories stand out over the past year in a noisy and highly competitive news environment, and also helped these stories stand the test of time.
In March 15th’s “Has Mitt Romney Run a Lousy Campaign?” we see a foreshadowing of the struggles candidate Romney would have in the general election, based on how his campaign operated during a primary cycle that went on much longer than he might have wished.
In March 29th’s “If Obamacare Is Overturned, Can Democrats Recover?” we are reminded of a moment when the fate of the Obama campaign – and, indeed, of his presidential legacy — was out of the Democrats’ hands, provoking tremendous party-wide anxiety.
In October 1st’s “Meet the Ohio Voters Who Are Killing Romney’s Campaign,” Molly left the bubble of staged candidate events to listen to the voices of voters in economically depressed precincts of Ohio – a group of people we heard too little from in a campaign cycle dominated by Twitter controversies and insider views.
In October 24th’s “Obama’s Edge: The Ground Game That Could Put Him Over the Top,” she cataloged in impressive and meticulous detail the nature of the operational differences between the campaigns that in the end led to Obama’s victory.
In December 11th’s “The Marriage Plot: Inside This Year’s Epic Campaign for Gay Equality,” her instinct for the deep dive led her into a two-month reporting project that was rewarded with the full and complete story of how one of the most significant social changes of the young 21st century was shepherded into being.
In these stories and more she has shown a gift for developing sources, asking original questions, and– most importantly – for standing apart from the pack in a ways that allowed her to pursue definitive stories on some of the most important political topics of the 2012 campaign cycle.”
The Reporter: Molly Ball is a staff writer covering national politics at The Atlantic. She joined The Atlantic in September 2011 from Politico, where she covered the fight for the 2012 GOP nomination, the 2010 midterm elections, and the national political landscape. Prior to joining Politico in 2010, she was a reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Las Vegas Sun. There she covered Nevada’s competitive primary and general-election presidential race in 2008. Ball has also worked for newspapers in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Cambodia, as well as The New York Times and The Washington Post. A graduate of Yale University, she was a 2009 recipient of the Knight-Wallace journalism fellowship at the University of Michigan. She is married to David Kihara, managing editor of WJLA.com. They are the parents of Benjamin, age 3 ½ , and Miriam, born March 2, 2013.
-30-