Reporter PrincessSafiya Byers has won the coveted Gerald Loeb Award for her collaboration with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on “Milwaukee’s Hidden Landlords.”
The Loeb award is often referred to as the “Pulitzer Prize of business reporting.”
Byers teamed up with Journal Sentinel reporters Daphne Chen, Cary Spivak and Genevieve Redsten to examine Vinebrook Homes Trust, a multibillion-dollar private equity-backed firm that quietly bought about 1,000 single-family homes in the city before running into financial trouble.
The Journal Sentinel team produced a series of stories that also included an in-depth look at landlords that are among the most prolific evictors of tenants.
Other finalists in the Loeb local news category were Public Health Watch and a collaboration between Capital & Main and ProPublica.
“This project represents what happens when you unleash the powers of partnership and focus on serving readers,” said Ron Smith, executive director of the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service. “Instead of competing, this collaboration drew on the strengths of both newsrooms to collectively inform Milwaukee residents.”
Added Greg Borowski, executive editor of the Journal Sentinel: “This award underlines what can happen when skilled, committed journalists identify a problem, dig deep to understand it and then work together to share what they find with the community.”
Byers, a Milwaukee native, is a graduate of the Diedrich College of Communication at Marquette University.
Byers, 26, covers housing and basic needs issues for NNS, where she interned while in college.
Through the highly competitive Report For America program, which places journalists In newsrooms to focus on under-covered issues, Byers became NNS’ first full-time reporter in 2020.
“The work we do at Milwaukee NNS is authentic. We tell stories with the genuine interest of informing and celebrating Milwaukee,” she said. “It’s a rare experience to work for an organization that cares about the people it serves as much as NNS does.”
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