Missouri School of Journalism students win Online Journalism Award for series exposing use of industrial waste in fertilizer
COLUMBIA, Mo. (Aug. 29, 2025) — A team of students at the Missouri School of Journalism has won the Student Journalism Award from the Online Journalism Awards (OJA), a program of the Online News Association honoring digital storytelling.
The winning series, “Waste Land,” was published last year in the Columbia Missourian — the School of Journalism’s community newspaper — and investigated the impacts of industrial food waste and wastewater sludge dumped onto farms in Missouri and nationwide in the form of “free fertilizer.” This marks the second year in a row that the School of Journalism has earned the OJA Award; last year’s recognition went to “The Price of Plenty,” another series investigating the fertilizer industry.
In a striking example of the power of community reporting and investigative journalism, legislators introduced a stricter state law regulating the use of free fertilizer after the students questioned state officials for “Waste Land.”
“‘Waste Land’ shines as a product of public service and the Missouri Method of hands-on training,” said David Kurpius, dean of the School. “It’s great to see this kind of ground-level, fact-based reporting recognized nationally, but even more valuable are the positive impacts it creates for the communities we serve.”
The series, which developed out of a capstone Collaborative Reporting course co-taught by Sara Shipley Hiles and Kathy Kiely, featured a multimedia exploration of the many issues related to fertilizer sludge, including runoff, stenches and the presence of PFAS (also known as “forever chemicals,” with a growing reputation for environmental pollution and accumulation in the human body). At least 14 students — nearly all undergraduates — who subsequently earned their degrees worked on the reporting, graphics and photography.
“We used investigative techniques, including public records requests and data analysis. We got on the ground and talked to residents. We also looked at the regulatory framework that enables spreading sludge. We wanted to call public attention to a commonly accepted practice that has unintended consequences.”
Sara Shipley Hiles
While this is the first award for the series as a whole, Ceilidh Kern, BJ ’24, won the North American Agricultural Journalists’ (NAAJ) student award in 2024 for one of the stories, which revealed that local farmers had been unwittingly spreading PFAS-laden fertilizer on their fields.
Kern, who was also a student reporter for the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk (a nonprofit environmental journalism collaborative led by Hiles) became the second Ag & Water Desk student in as many years to win the NAAJ student award. The prior year’s honor went to Adam Goldstein, MA ’23, for another Columbia Missourian story describing changes in land management among Midwestern farmers.
“It’s been such an honor to see this project connect with both readers and other journalists,” Kern wrote on LinkedIn after the OJA Award was announced Thursday. “I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to collaborate with such an amazing group on this series and to share information about the unglamorous — but important — topic of sludge and how it impacts the environment, farmers and the food on our tables.”
Hiles said developing the series over the course of an entire semester allowed students to perform a wide variety of rigorous, hands-on tasks that are vital to the work of professional journalists.
“We used investigative techniques, including public records requests and data analysis,” Hiles said. “We got on the ground and talked to residents. We also looked at the regulatory framework that enables spreading sludge. We wanted to call public attention to a commonly accepted practice that has unintended consequences.”
That work was clearly evident to the OJA judges, who praised the students for the series’ depth and presentation.
“This investigative reporting and the way the winning project was presented is something that you would’ve expected by professionals, not students,” the judges said. “The team went above and beyond to produce a multimedia-driven package that was well-researched, interactive and interesting.”
The students who worked on the series include:
- Athena Fosler-Brazil, BJ ’24
- Catie Cobble, BJ ’25
- Samantha Dietel, BJ ’24
- Emmet Jamieson, BJ ’24
- Ceilidh Kern, BJ ’24
- Teagan King, BJ ’24
- Teddy Maiorca, BJ ’23, MA ’24
- Joy Mazur, BJ ’23, MA ’24
- Hailey Peck, BJ ’24
- Halle Paulus, BJ ’24
- Harrison Petty, BJ ’24
- Sarah Rubinstein, BJ ’24
- Madi Schott, BJ ’24
- Christian Wright, BJ ’24
Updated: August 29, 2025