2024 Dao Prize for Excellence in Local Journalism
Lauren Caruba won the 2024 Best Local Journalism Dao Prize with Ari Sen and Smiley Pool for The Dallas Morning News for their series exposing the critical gaps in trauma care, revealing that many lives could be saved with better access to blood transfusions in the field. They received $10,000 for their reporting.
Lauren Caruba is an award-winning journalist and investigative reporter for The Dallas Morning News, where she focuses on long-term projects and accountability reporting. She previously was a staff writer from 2016 through 2021 for the San Antonio Express-News, where she covered investigations, health & medicine and education.
Lauren’s body of work on COVID garnered her numerous accolades, including recognition as a 2021 local reporting finalist in the prestigious Livingston Awards for Young Journalists. In the statewide Texas APME contest, she won 1st place in Specialty Reporting and 2nd place in Star Reporter of the Year. Her story, “Night Shift: 18 hours inside a COVID-19 ICU,” will also appear in the 2022 anthology, Best American Newspaper Narratives, Vol. 9, published by the University of North Texas Press and the Mayborn Graduate Institute of Journalism.
Her earlier work in San Antonio included a yearlong series documenting the lives of transgender San Antonians and the divisive debate in the Texas Legislature over the “bathroom bill,” for which she was selected as a 2018 finalist in the Livingston Awards.
Here are the reports that won them the prize:
WHY SO MANY AMERICANS BLEED TO DEATH AFTER A TRAUMATIC INJURY, Lauren Caruba, November 28, 2023
‘WE WANT PEOPLE TO LIVE’: HOW SAN ANTONIO IS TRYING TO PREVENT DEATHS FROM BLOOD LOSS, Lauren Caruba, November 29, 2023
A SOUTH TEXAS MAN WAS BLEEDING OUT FROM A MAJOR ARM INJURY. WOULD HELP GET THERE IN TIME? Lauren Caruba, November 29, 2023
TRAUMA DESERTS IN RURAL AMERICA: WHERE YOU LIVE CAN DETERMINE WHETHER YOU LIVE, Lauren Caruba and Ari Sen, November 30, 2023
DALLAS-FORT WORTH LAGS BEHIND OTHER TEXAS CITIES IN EARLY BLOOD TRANSFUSION CARE. BUT THAT’S CHANGING, Lauren Caruba, December 1, 2023
A NORTH TEXAS MAN NEARLY DIED AFTER A HORRIFIC, HEAD-ON CRASH. HERE’S WHAT SAVED HIM, Lauren Caruba, December 1, 2023
HOW WE REPORTED OUR INVESTIGATION INTO STARK DISPARITIES IN TRAUMA CARE WITHIN THE U.S. HEALTH CARE SYSTEM, Ari Sen and Lauren Caruba, November 30, 2023
MAP: FIND YOUR NEAREST TRAUMA CENTER, Ari Sen and Lauren Caruba, December 1, 2023