Public Health Watch’s investigative podcast, Fumed, has won top honors in the National Headliner Awards.
The serial podcast follows two politically conservative residents of Channelview, Texas, a riverfront community near Houston, as they try to slow encroachment by the ever-expanding petrochemical industry. Produced by a team of Public Health Watch journalists, Fumed won first place in the narrative podcast category.
Contest judges wrote:
“This podcast has strong storytelling and characters from the beginning. While it had a very strong sense of place in Texas, especially with a use of natural sound, the broad strokes of this important investigation could apply to any number of communities in America struggling with environmental challenges brought on by companies who are seemingly beholden to no one. It was also well written, well voiced and succinct.”
The National Headliner Awards date to 1935. It was the first journalism contest to recognize Edward R. Murrow’s radio reporting from Vienna during the Nazi takeover in 1939; Murrow won a second Headliner in 1944, for his reporting on the Allied bombing of Berlin. Many prominent journalists have been honored in the decades since, including Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, of NBC’s long-running newscast, “The Huntley-Brinkley Report,” and Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald, who broke the Jeffrey Epstein story.
“This honor validates the herculean efforts of our team to create our inaugural podcast,” said Jim Morris, Public Health Watch’s executive director and editor-in-chief. “Few members of this team had any podcasting experience prior to working on Fumed. Their hard work, and exceptional editing, made the series compelling and original. Texas Public Radio played a crucial role as our distribution partner.”
Since its release in March 2025, Fumed has been downloaded more than 300,000 times – 250,000 times on the NPR app alone.
The podcast also received honorable mentions in the Best in Business awards from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing (SABEW) and the Molly Awards, sponsored by the Texas Observer.
Three of the reporters who worked on Fumed – David Leffler, Savanna Strott and Salina Arredondo – are finalists in the University of Michigan’s Livingston Awards for journalists under 35. Winners will be announced June 9.