The Seattle Times’ investigation of the systems failing teenagers addicted to fentanyl wins the 2025 Anthony Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics
A team of three reporters from The Seattle Times has won the 2025 Anthony Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics for their work showing the barriers preventing young people from accessing treatment for opioid addiction in Washington.
Hannah Furfaro, Lauren Frohne and Ivy Ceballo uncovered how systems are failing teens in Washington, a state in which emergency responses to youth overdoses have quadrupled since 2019. For this work, the team built relationships with vulnerable teenagers while taking painstaking steps to ensure they weren’t further endangering the teens’ safety. The result is a compelling series that shows the heartbreaking impacts of flawed policy making and foregrounds the crucial voices of those most affected by this crisis.
The Center for Journalism Ethics will present the award on April 9 in a ceremony at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. The event will also feature a conversation on journalism ethics with Jane Mayer of The New Yorker moderated by award-winning journalist David Maraniss.
Registration for the ceremony is now open.
Named for UW–Madison alum and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Anthony Shadid, the award honors the difficult ethical decisions journalists make when telling high-impact stories. Shadid, who died in 2012 while on assignment covering Syria, was a member of the Center for Journalism Ethics advisory board and worked to encourage integrity in reporting.
The Shadid Award judging committee lauded the extraordinary care The Seattle Times team demonstrated in carrying out their investigation. Kathryn McGarr, associate professor in the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication and chair of the committee, said this year’s winning entry was part of an exceptionally strong slate of entrants.
“The painstaking care that Ceballo, Furfaro and Frohne took with their piece exemplifies such excellent work in ethical decision-making throughout a long process,” McGarr said. “They made difficult choices along the way, ultimately presenting readers with nuanced portraits of their subjects and work that makes a difference to an underserved population.”
Jane Mayer, the award ceremony’s featured guest, has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995. The magazine’s chief Washington correspondent, she covers politics, culture and national security. Previously, she worked at the Wall Street Journal, where she covered the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, the Gulf War and the fall of the Berlin Wall. She is the author of four best-selling books, including “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right” and “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals.” Mayer is the recipient of many honors, including the George Polk Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the John Chancellor Award, the Goldsmith Book Prize, a Peabody and an Emmy.
Conversation moderator David Maraniss is a New York Times bestselling author and associate editor at The Washington Post.
2025 Finalists
- Lisa Schencker, Emily Hoerner, Stacey Wescott, Chicago Tribune. In this investigative series, reporters exposed how Illinois health care systems failed to protect patients from sexual abuse and how state government failed to hold them responsible. In reporting this story, the journalists took care with survivors’ stories and their requests for anonymity and navigated the complication of delaying publication for a broader story with potentially more impact.
- Sarah Topol, The New York Times Magazine. Freelance journalist Sarah Topol investigated the experience of soldiers who have deserted the Russian army amid its ongoing war in Ukraine. In the process, Topol navigated several ethical challenges, including gaining trust of sources, protecting them from retribution and maintaining secure communications under persistent hacking attempts.
- Kavitha Surana, Cassandra Jaramillo, Lizzie Presser, Stacy Kranitz, ProPublica. This team of reporters exposed what happened when women with life-threatening pregnancies were denied abortions in Tennessee, Georgia and Texas. In producing these stories, they weighed the sources’ desire for privacy regarding painful family history and the urgent need to inform the public that people were dying in preventable ways under abortion bans.
- Sari Horowitz, Dana Hedgpeth, Scott Higham, Emmanuel Martinez, Joyce Sohyun Lee, Andrew Ba Tran, Nilo Tabrizy, Salwan Georges, Jahi Chikwendiu,The Washington Post. This Washington Post team documented that at least 3,104 students died at U.S. government-run Indian boarding schools between 1828 and 1970 – more than three times what was previously reported. This investigation required exploring what should be made public about the deaths of these students as well as working with Native American leaders and researchers to sensitively shed light on this tragic chapter in American history.
About Anthony Shadid
The award is named for Anthony Shadid, a UW-Madison journalism alumnus and foreign reporter for the Washington Post, The New York Times and The Associated Press. Shadid won two Pulitzer Prizes for his courageous and informed journalism. He died in February 2012 while reporting in Syria.
Shadid had a special connection to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, its School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Center for Journalism Ethics. He sat on the Center’s advisory board and was a strong supporter of its aim to promote public interest journalism and to stimulate discussion about journalism ethics.