An NPR podcast featuring Howard Berkes, a reporter for Public Health Watch, won two national Signal Awards for an episode related to his 12-year span of investigating the resurgence of black lung disease among coal miners.
The winning entry, announced Tuesday, is Coal’s Deadly Dust, a 2023 episode of the NPR podcast UpFirst/The Sunday Story. The segment captured both a judges award and a Listener’s Choice award for Best Driveway Moment in an individual podcast episode.
Berkes’ reporting began in 2011 in the wake of a deadly coal mine disaster in West Virginia. Autopsies on the miners who died revealed an extraordinarily high rate of black lung disease, even among younger miners with relatively few years underground. That prompted an investigation in partnership with The Center for Public Integrity, where PHW founder and Editor-in-Chief Jim Morris worked at the time. Morris edited the black lung investigation that resulted.
Berkes came out of retirement in 2023 to report for PHW on a long-delayed federal proposal to protect coal miners from the silica dust that caused an epidemic of severe black lung disease affecting thousands of coal miners. That reporting was also published by NPR and led to the podcast episode, which detailed Berkes’ investigative reporting and its impact. PHW’s 2023 stories were part of that podcast episode.
“I’m grateful to Public Health Watch for giving the black lung reporting a home after we discovered serious problems with the proposed regulation that was supposed to address the epidemic of severe disease with new protections for coal miners,” Berkes said. “This reporting fits the PHW mission, which includes investigations focused on workplace safety and health, and holding public agencies accountable.”
The 2023 reporting prompted federal regulators to change some elements of its proposed regulation; those were incorporated into the final version in 2024.