Chris Baker of Syracuse.com and The Post-Standard has won a national business journalism award.
Baker took the first place award in the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing’s 26th annual Best in Business competition. The award recognizes Baker’s story on Simon Slee — the British real estate player who lured investors from around the globe, undermining Syracuse’s poorest neighborhoods.
Baker combined a deep dive into public records, interviews with Slee’s associates here, and a global search for his victims to reveal an enterprise that fed slum housing for poor Syracuse families. The story had never been told.
The story won for the best investigative report in 2020 among news operations in Syracuse’s market size.
SABEW calls itself the world’s largest and oldest organization of business and financial journalists. The group received 1,126 entries from 161 news organizations including international, national and regional news outlets and specialized business publications.
The contest judges noted the project’s striking visuals from Christa Lemczak, Dennis Nett, Katrina Tulloch, Baker and Scott Trimble:
An outstanding piece of reporting and a gripping read. Featuring vivid photos, interviews from around the globe and a video package, this story took months of digging and showed how a British man bought up 100 low-income Syracuse rental properties and sold them to foreign investors by lying about the home’s investment potential. The result was years of blighted and unsafe properties in the city, a lot of angry investors and, ultimately, the suicide of the Brit.