CoStar News was recognized for innovation by the world’s largest financial journalism organization for an interactive report analyzing technology giant Amazon’s real estate use across the United States.
An outside panel of judges for the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing selected the award winners for work published in 2021. They gave the Best in Business Award in the innovation category to “Tracing the Path of Amazon’s 100 Million-Square-Foot Journey to Real Estate Dominance,” by CoStar journalists Clare Kennedy, Jacquelyn Ryan, Rohit Diwadkar and Jelena Schulz. The competition included more than 1,200 entries from 194 news organizations, with such prominent publications as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.
The report analyzed the commercial property strategy of Amazon, the nation's most active industrial tenant, with a custom-built interactive map that lets readers zoom in on real estate holdings on a national, citywide and individual property scale.
The judges said the interactive multimedia analysis shines “a light on the types of mega-corporations that demand such scrutiny,” while praising the “detailed work” in a category designed to encourage creative approaches to storytelling.
The analysis also conveyed to the average reader an understanding of how Seattle-based Amazon is filling up warehouses in towns across America, while providing warehouse owners who may want to try to have Amazon as a tenant with a breakdown of the criteria the company uses to select industrial property.
The award for innovation in the SABEW contest comes after CoStar News won eight awards in December from the National Association of Real Estate Editors, the country's biggest real estate journalism organization, for work spanning breaking news, economic analysis and investigative reporting.