Award-Winning Special Reports

Here are excerpts from two of my 15 articles that have won top journalism prizes. Editors: Contact me for full clips.


"The decision to divest: incredible of inevitable?" - Trudy E. Bell, IEEE Spectrum, November, 1985, pp. 46-54.

"The telephone was ringing in a condominium of the Park City, Utah, Ski Lodge on the evening of Jan. 2, 1982, as Assistant Attorney General William F. Baxter was walking in after his first day on the snowy mountain slopes. The voice on the other end of the line was that of Charles L. Brown, chairman of the board of AT&T, calling from Florida.
     "'Maybe we could work out the settlement this way,'" Brown said. And he proposed a compromise to the last impasse that had stymied negotiations for breaking up the largest corporation in the world: American Telephone & Telegraph.
     "Over the previous two weeks, Baxter and two trusted assistants had been secretly negotiating…"

This 9-magazine-page investigative lead report on the AT&T divestiture helped IEEE Spectrum win  the 1986 National Magazine Award--the magazine equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize--for Special Issue. Among other coups, it included the first ever journalist's interview with Judge Harold H. Greene, and profiled how the opposing lawyers became such good friends they still meet annually for softball.

"The fatal flaw in Flight 51-L,"  - Trudy E. Bell and Karl Esch, IEEE Spectrum, February, 1987, pp. 36-51.

"Roger M. Boisjoly strode angrily down the hall to his office. An engineer with Morton-Thiokol Inc.'s Wasatch division, near Brigham City, Utah, Boisjoly was on the team behind the solid-fuel rocket boosters used for the space shuttle lift-offs.
     "He passed the open door of the company's management information center, where colleagues were waiting to watch the launch the morning of Jan. 28, 1986. One caught Boisjoly in the hallway. 'Come on, Roger. Come on in and watch.' He shook his head. The night before, he and a handful of other engineers had done their absolute best to have the launch postponed, and he still felt drained and frustrated.
     "Still, on that urging, he turned reluctantly into the room. And so, a few moments later, Roger Boisjoly was watching as Challenger vanished into a fireball, and saw on the screen the rain of fragments dropping toward the Atlantic, nine miles below.
     "Challenger was destroyed after hot propellant gases blew past the aft joint…"

Among other coups, Trudy E. Bell and coauthor/photographer Karl Esch interviewed every principal in the launch command chain and personally photographed the Challenger's wreckage.

This 16-page investigative cover-story of the space shuttle Challenger disaster won three highest honors in 1988: the Top Writing Award of the Aviation Space Writers Association, the First Award of the Society for National Association Publishers, and the IEEE's own coveted John D. Ryder Communicator of the Year Award..

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