2017 Azbee Awards of Excellence
Category
Online > Impact/Investigative > Northeast
Awarded to
Alex Plough, Reporter; Marion Halftermeyer, Reporter; Alexander Gladstone, Reporter
Entry details
Dangers in the Deep
Issue date (if applicable):
Publication name: Debtwire
Publishing company: MergerMarket Group
Website home page: www.debtwire.com
Please describe the publication's mission and readership:
Debtwire is the premier global news and analysis service covering the leveraged credit markets, with a specialized emphasis in the areas of distressed debt, restructuring and bankruptcy. Advisors, consultants, asset managers and trading professionals around the world rely Debtwire’s services to refine their decision making and gain a crucial competitive advantage.
The Debtwire content team is comprised of trusted financial journalists, credit and legal analysts, all with considerable experience in trading, law and investment banking.
Please describe the enterprising work that went into this entry and its significance or impact on readers:
Debtwire’s investigative team set out this summer to bring greater transparency to multi-billion dollar cloud hanging over the offshore energy industry.
During the course of an eight-week investigation three journalists worked collaboratively to reveal the true ramifications of a regulatory change that would leave already vulnerable energy companies on the hook for billions in costs associated with shutting down oil wells and dismantling the steel platforms used to produce oil on the US Gulf coast.
Environmental impact aside, these new regulations meant that battered E&P companies, who had already been badly damaged by the recent dip in oil prices, now needed to grapple with how to cover the cost of decommissioning or plugging and abandoning (P&A) their wells.
The reporters responsible for this impactful story had the time and resources to interview dozens of sources and pour through hundreds of government and SEC filings thanks to the creation of the Debtwire Investigations unit in the summer of 2016. The team was built to leverage the newsroom’s financial market expertise and allow long-form investigative pieces to flourish.
The story was supported by an interactive map of the Gulf of Mexico that shows all of the leaseholders operating in the region, and a second interactive map of every standing structure in the region color-coded by age. The team also created a chart ranking the top 25 operators by their liabilities, and a chart outlining the number of bankruptcies in the sector since the crash of oil prices in 2014.
Links to entry URLs
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Entry URL(s), if applicable:
http://try.debtwire.com/dwi-americas/
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Dangers in the Deep
Category
Online > Impact/Investigative > Northeast
Description
Publication name:
Debtwire
Company:
MergerMarket Group
Winner Status
- National Silver Award
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