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 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison will present the award on April 9 in a ceremony at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. 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 at https://ethics.journalism.wisc.edu/2025-shadid-award-ceremony/
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.
The Center for Journalism Ethics, housed in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UW–Madison, provides an international hub to examine the role of professional and personal ethics in the pursuit of fair, accurate and principled journalism. Founded in 2008, the Center offers resources for journalists, educators, students and the public, including internationally recognized conferences exploring key issues in journalism.
