Finalist: Valerie Bauerlein, Heather Rogers, Colin McNulty, Nathan Singhapok and Rachel Humphreys of The Wall Street Journal and Spotify Studios
Nominated Work
Biography
Valerie Bauerlein covers national affairs for The Wall Street Journal from Raleigh, N.C. She has a special interest in small-town America and Southern politics, economics and culture.
Valerie has covered the South Carolina presidential primaries for The Wall Street Journal since 2008. She has also covered natural and manmade disasters, from Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast and the mass slayings at Emanuel Church in Charleston to the deadly condominium collapse in Surfside, Fla. She has written features about Nascar, roller coasters, beauty pageants and Waffle House.
Previously, Valerie covered Coke, Pepsi and the beverage and snack industry for the Journal from Atlanta. She also covered Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Wachovia and other regional banks from their acquisition tear in 2005 to the crash in 2008. She began her career at The Shelby (N.C.) Star and worked as a cops reporter at the Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal, a legislative reporter at The State (Columbia, S.C.) and congressional correspondent for the News & Observer (Raleigh).
Valerie is the author of “The Devil at His Elbow: Alex Murdaugh and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty” (Ballantine, 2024).
Heather Rogers is a journalist and producer currently at The Journal, the flagship daily news show at The Wall Street Journal and Spotify. She's been in audio for a decade, having previously made narrative and episodic shows at Gimlet Media. Her print work includes longform articles for outlets such as The New York Times Magazine, ProPublica and Rolling Stone. She has written two books, Gone Tomorrow and Green Gone Wrong, and won multiple grants for her investigative work. Her particular strength is translating complex issues into human stories.
Colin McNulty is a supervising editor on The Journal. He has produced and edited dozens of audio documentaries for BBC Radio, WBEZ Chicago, Pushkin, Higher Ground and APM. In 2025, Colin won a Peabody Award for the Audible podcast Pulse: The Untold Story.
Nathan Singhapok is a composer, sound designer and audio engineer from San Francisco, currently residing in Brooklyn, N.Y. Prior to his work on The Journal, Nathan worked as an audio restoration engineer with The Criterion Collection, and as a freelance composer for short film and media.
Rachel Humphreys was a senior producer for The Journal podcast. Previously, Rachel hosted the Guardian’s daily news podcast Today in Focus and worked as an audio journalist for a range of broadcasters in the U.K., including the BBC.