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Steve Suo and Erin Hoover Barnett Steve and Erin are veteran reporters at The Oregonian in Portland, Oregon.  Their series "Unnecessary Epidemic" showed how the federal government and profit-driven pharmaceutical companies long ago could have contained the spread of the country's insidious methamphetamine epidemic. A drug that delivers cheap highs and often psychosis-inducing addiction, meth has become to rural America what crack cocaine was to inner cities in the 1980s. Their series reveals how simple but compelling solutions were delayed, scantly funded, or abandoned time and again, allowing the drug's abuse to spread inexorably from West Coast to East, and how misinformed priorities and profit motive have conspired to derail promising strategies to stop meth's spread. The series was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting and Harvard University's 2005 Goldsmith Award for Investigative Reporting. Media critic Jack Shafer of Slate.com calls the authors "intellectually honest and intrepid reporters" and urges his colleagues "don't, don't, don't write a column inch on the subject before you read the Oregonian's comprehensive methamphetamine package from head to toe." The Washington Monthly called Steve and Erin's series "one of the best pieces of reporting anywhere this year.”  Steve's specialty as a journalist is long-term projects that combine statistical analysis with traditional investigative techniques. He received a 1995 Best of the West award for an in-depth profile of an Oregon hotel tycoon who became the state's top Republican campaign contributor. His coverage of the government's fumbling effort to contain the environmental damage of a major shipwreck, with The Oregonian staff, was a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News. He holds a master's degree from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and a bachelor's degree in government from Oberlin College. Erin is a noted narrative journalist. She was the first journalist to follow three Oregonians to their deaths following passage of the state's landmark law allowing physician-assisted suicide. Her stories on the topic were runner-up in the American Society for Newspaper Editors' contest in the highly competitive non-deadline writing category, and were  published in the Poynter Institute's 1999 Best Newspaper Stories. She was a 2004 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

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