A series of radio reports on the VA and foreclosures on veterans wins 2024 MRE Journalism Contest

Chris Arnold is a correspondent with NPR’s investigations team. His stories often focus on people who are being mistreated and need help. His series of stories from 2018-2020, “The Trouble with TEACH Grants,” resulted in congressional action that gave thousands of teachers their grant money back and erased their debts. His stories on the victims of banking and mortgage scandals have won the Gerald Loeb Award, the National Association of Consumer Advocates Award for Investigative Journalism, the George Foster Peabody Award, and the Edward R. Murrow Award (twice). Over his career at NPR, Arnold has covered a range of subjects — from Katrina recovery in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, to immigrant workers in the fishing industry, to the Olympics. Arnold is a former Nieman Fellow and Lecturer on radio journalism at Yale University. He has worked in public radio since 1993.

Quil Lawrence covers national security, climate and veterans’ issues for NPR news. Lawrence started his radio career by interviewing con-men in Tangier, Morocco in 1995. He then moved to Bogotá, Colombia, stringing for NPR, the BBC and the LA Times. Lawrence began reporting on Iraq in 2000, and Afghanistan in 2001, and he covered those countries and the Middle East for 12 years as a BBC correspondent and later as NPR’s Bureau Chief in Baghdad and
then Kabul. In 2012, Lawrence returned to the U.S. to report on veterans and the VA for NPR. He’s won awards for his work in Colombia, Sudan, Iraq and for his coverage of veterans. He co-hosted Home/Front, a podcast about the civilian-military divide, which won an Edward R. Murrow Award