Eric Dexenhiemer
Recipient of the STAR REPORTER OF THE YEAR award in The Charles E. Green Awards (2024)
Eric Dexenhiemer
Houston Chronicle
Judge’s Comments:
All three finalists for this year’s Charles E. Green Award did terrific work. Kim Smith’s work in Odessa is just the kind of tough, local reporting every city needs. Her tenacity in filing open records requests when officials clam up should be a lesson to reporters everywhere, now more than ever. And Dina Arelavo’s deep dive into the Rio Grande Valley’s water woes and the tangled international legal context is a model of intelligent explanation — especially when it comes to the limitations of agreements that politicians crow about.
Ultimately, however, the Charles E. Green award goes to Eric Dexenhiemer of the Houston Chronicle. The breadth of his work is stunning over the year, with great stories on the Texas Lottery scandal, but also on Houston’s constables, mind-boggling property tax hustles and local shenanigans in Loving County, where officials defunded the police. (When does he sleep?) The lottery series, especially, showed a relentlessness in cracking a mysterious jackpot that might be all the more scandalous for the parts of it that appear to be legal. The stories also show deeply suspicious behavior by officials who helped professional gamblers score a big win. What’s more, the stories led to changes in the rules intended to keep it from happening again. All of these hallmarks of great investigative journalism make Dexenheimer the clear winner of this year’s award.
John R. Schwartz
The University of Texas, Professor of Practice
Judge’s Bio:
John Schwartz is a professor of practice in journalism at the University of Texas at Austin School of Journalism Media, and the associate director of the university’s Global Sustainability Leadership Institute.
He began his teaching career in 2021. From 2000 until July 2021, he worked at the New York Times, primarily as a science writer. He spent the last seven years there as part of the newspaper’s dozen-person team covering climate coverage. The Times initially hired him to cover technology; his later beats included the U.S. space program, including the loss of the shuttle Columbia and its crew, Hurricane Katrina and the efforts to rebuild hurricane protection around the city, and legal affairs. Over his years at the Times, his reporting took him from Moscow to the Mojave Desert, and involved everything from riding a mud-spewing dredge on the Mississippi River to climbing to the top of a 300-foot wind turbine to strapping into a jet pack. From 1993 until 2000, at the Washington Post, he reported on topics that included federal efforts to regulate the tobacco industry, the Unabomber case, and the school shooting in Jonesboro, Arkansas. At the NYT and WP, he wrote stories for nearly every section of the newspaper. From 1985 until 1993, he worked at Newsweek Magazine, ultimately becoming a senior editor in the business section.
He has written several books, including "Oddly Normal: One Family's Struggle to Help Their Teenage Son Come to Terms with His Sexuality," and "This Is the Year I Put My Financial Life in Order.”
He was born in Galveston, Texas, and graduated from the University of Texas and its law school. He is the son of the late A.R. “Babe” Schwartz, a former Texas state senator, and the late Marilyn Schwartz, a civic official and businesswoman. He is married to his college sweetheart, Jeanne Mixon. They have three children, who live in Texas, in New Jersey and in Australia, and two grandchildren.
To read Eric Dexenhiemer’s prize-winning work, please click the link below: