KHN and Guardian US Win National Press Club Award for “Lost on the Frontline”

Kaiser Health News (KHN) from KFF and Guardian US have won the National Press Club's top award for online journalism for their "Lost on the Frontline" research. The year-long project documented the lives of more than 3,600 healthcare workers in the United States who died after contracting Covid-19 in the workplace.

The Press Club's Joan M. Friedenberg Online Journalism Award recognizes "the best journalism that uses online technology to deliver more compelling coverage than a print or broadcast story alone." Journalists from KHN and the Guardian developed an online searchable database of the deceased and used it as a starting point for a series of investigative reports that provided insight into the functioning – and failures – of the American healthcare system during the pandemic.

They found that many of the deaths could have been prevented. The widespread shortage of masks and other personal protective equipment, lack of Covid testing, poor contact tracing, inconsistent mask guidelines from politicians, missteps by employers, and lax enforcement of occupational safety regulations by state regulators all contributed to the increased risk to health workers.

Key findings include that two-thirds of the deceased health care workers for whom the project contains data were black people, revealing the deep inequalities of race, ethnicity, and economic status in the American health care professions. Lower-paid workers such as nurses, nurses, and nursing home workers died more often than doctors.

More than 100 journalists participated in the project. They filed requests for public records, combed government and private data sources, searched obituaries and social media posts, and confirmed deaths from family members, workplaces and coworkers.

This is the second time in four years that KHN has won this National Press Club award. The Newsroom, an operational program of the KFF, won an investigation into the booming orphan drug business in 2018. The Lost on the Frontline project has also won awards from the News Leaders Association, the World Association of News Publishers, and the NIHCM Foundation, just a few of the many awards and honors KHN has received for its journalism.

About KFF and KHN

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a nationwide newsroom that produces in-depth journalism on health topics. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three most important operating programs of the KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is a non-profit foundation that provides the country with information on health issues.

Via Guardian News & Media

Guardian US is known for its Pulitzer Prize-winning study of widespread covert surveillance by the National Security Agency and other award-winning work, including The Paradise Papers. Guardian US has offices in New York, Washington, New Orleans, and Oakland, California serving the topics of climate crisis, politics, race and immigration, gender, national security, and more.

Guardian News & Media (GNM), publisher of theguardian.com, is one of the largest English-language newspaper websites in the world. Since the US and Australia launched digital editions in 2011 and 2013, respectively, traffic from outside the UK now accounts for more than two-thirds of The Guardian's total digital audience.

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