2019 Azbee Awards of Excellence

Category

All Content > Enterprise News Story > Northeast

Awarded to

Kyle Younker and Taylor Harrison

Entry details

Appalachia’s coal comeback collides with grim opioid reality

Issue date (if applicable): 
Publication name: Debtwire
Publishing company: Acuris
Website home page: https://www.debtwire.com/homepage

Please describe the publication's mission and readership:

Debtwire provides high value news, data and analysis on debt markets worldwide. Our intelligence spans real time news, in-depth credit analysis, data, covenant research, specialist coverage of structured finance and municipal bond markets.

Please describe the enterprising work that went into this entry and its significance or impact on readers:

Kyle Younker’s expose on the overlap of two of the last year’s biggest news stories – the opioid epidemic and the would-be coal comeback – provided a unique look into the challenges facing many communities in central Appalachia.

Conventional wisdom in recent years has held that in coal country, thousands of out-of-work miners remain ready to return to the trenches if only the jobs would return. The real story, as is often the case, is more complicated.

Getting the story behind the vicious cycle of opioid use and coal mining didn’t come easy. For one, most of the coal companies operating in central Appalachia are privately held, so any information about earnings and labor costs are closely guarded. Kyle initially hit a wall of silence with the executives he reached out to, especially as some C-suite leaders harbored displeasure over Kyle’s previous coverage of the bankruptcies of their companies. As a reporter covering distressed debt and bankruptcy, Kyle had closely covered the descent into bankruptcy of Walter Energy, Alpha Natural Resources, and Peabody Energy, among others. Some light opened up on the story, however, when executives from Blackhawk Mining, a privately-held coal miner with operations in West Virginia, began speaking to their investors more openly about the labor issues they were facing – and the menace of drug addiction among potential workers.

Links to entry URLs

Please note: These URLs are only required for entries in the Online division categories, entries in the Design division categories that are specific to websites, entries in the Website of the Year category, and entries in the Cross-Platform Package of the Year category.

Entry URL(s), if applicable:
http://investigations.debtwire.com/appalachias-coal-comeback-collides-with-grim-opioid-reality/

Links to Uploaded Entry Files

Please note: The links below are the same links as clicking on the Preview images at the top of this column. You may click the links below to view each submitted entry file.

View entry file #1 
View entry file #2 
View entry file #3 
View entry file #4
View entry file #5 
View entry file #6 
View entry file #7 
View entry file #8 
View entry file #9 
View entry file #10