Provide a brief synopsis of the story or stories, including any significant findings.

Reporter Kelley Weiss reports on the economy and its impact on health and health care for this beat. The first piece looked into the dental credit cards issue because of a proposed piece of legislation to protect consumers from signing up for a credit card unknowingly or getting charged for services they did not receive. The second article examined the rise in teenage prostitution and its correlation with funding cuts for youth support programs. The third story detailed the problems California's budget cuts created for low-income families. The final piece looked at the budget cuts with more depth, and highlighted the ways which state budget cuts decrease federal funding for the state.

Judge's comments: Weiss used the "slumping economy" and its impact on health care decisions for her stories. Recognizing the challenge of time in radio reporting, Weiss chose to go deep rather than wide on specific topics impacting her listeners. She produced four well-told pieces that made full use of "little-guy" examples, humanizing issues that might otherwise be a snooze. She profiled a single family that suffered a range of state cuts. A piece on teen prostitutes conveyed a sadness and fatigue that no written piece could have captured.

Weiss' work:

• Charge It: Patients Rack up Dental Care Debt, aired March 3, 2009
• Street-Level Economics: More Teens Selling Their Bodies, aired March 31, 2009
• Scope of Budget Cuts Could Have Major Impact on Poor Families, aired June 10, 2009
• California Budget Cuts Forfeit Billions in Federal Funding, aired August 5, 2009

See the contest questionnaire in which the reporter writes about how this work was done.