Personal finance journalists honored by RTDNA and the National Endowment for Financial Education

From left to right: Blake Ellis from CNNMoney, Uri Berliner from NPR and Don Dare from WATE.

RTDNA and the National Endowment for Financial Education recognized three personal finance reporters Sunday morning at the Excellence in Personal Finance Reporting Awards session.

Don Dare from WATE in Knoxville, Uri Berliner from NPR and Blake Ellis from CNNMoney shared their award-winning stories and talked about their approach to storytelling during the hour-long breakout.

“Sometimes inserting yourself can make for a better narrative,” Berliner said about his radio piece on the psychology behind investing. He invested his own money into various funds, talking to psychologists and investors in order to understand why people try to “beat the markets.”

Dare said he found his story on debt relief firm, New Life Financial Consulting, from WATE’s phone tip line. An elderly woman from Tennessee lost more than $3,000 to the company after they called her and said they would help her get rid of her debt. Dare said he wanted to let her tell the story and asked her for a copy of the contract. He said he called and emailed the company but got no reply, even after the story was televised.

“I want to document it so they can’t come back and say well she didn’t have a contract with us and I can say yes she did,” he said.

Blake Ellis and her editors didn’t think her stories on how the Defense of Marriage Act financially impacts gay couples would get much traffic but they decided it was a story that needed to be told. She decided to use slideshows of different gay couples.

“I let couples tell their own stories,” she said.

-Photos by Erica Horton