Finalist: Andrew Beck Grace, Chip Brantley, Graham Smith, Nicole Beemsterboer and Robert Little of NPR

Andrew Beck Grace is the co-creator and co-host of White Lies, an investigative podcast from NPR that explores the 1965 unsolved murder of James Reeb in Selma, Alabama. His nonfiction film work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and on PBS’s Independent Lens. His interactive documentary, After the Storm, has been exhibited internationally and was nominated for an Emmy in New Approaches to Documentary.

Chip Brantley is the co-creator and co-host of White Lies, an investigative podcast from NPR that explores the 1965 unsolved murder of James Reeb in Selma, Ala. Brantley is the author of the book The Perfect Fruit, and his work has appeared in Slate, Gourmet, the Oxford American, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, among others. He was the creative producer of Whitman, Alabama, an experimental documentary that was a 2018 Emmy nominee in the New Approaches in Documentary category. An instructor in journalism at the University of Alabama, Brantley is the founder of the Desert Island Supply Co., a nonprofit creative writing program for kids in Birmingham, Ala.

Graham Smith is a Senior Producer on NPR's Investigations Unit. His work as a producer, reporter, and photographer has taken listeners across the U.S. and into conflict zones from the Mid-East to Asia and Africa. He is the lead producer for the White Lies podcast.

Smith served a record-setting stint as supervising producer of All Things Considered, and edited Morning Edition. Having spent years crafting clarity from the froth of breaking news, Smith now works with independent producers and NPR staffers on sound-rich, long-form pieces and podcasts.

Nicole Beemsterboer is a Senior Producer of Investigations at NPR, where she oversees the conceptualization, development, and execution of the network's investigative reporting across all platforms and coordinates the team's internal and external news partnerships.

Since joining the team in 2013, she has produced and edited some of NPR's most ambitious reporting projects, from a series exposing the U.S. military's secret race-based chemical weapons testing program in World War II to uncovering a dramatic surge in complicated black lung, a deadly coal miners' disease, in Appalachia. Her work on the 2017 series, Lost Mothers, with NPR's Renee Montagne and ProPublica's Nina Martin, helped start a national conversation on the state of maternal care across the country.

Longtime investigative reporter and editor Robert Little leads NPR's investigations team, working with reporters, producers, and editors to develop investigative stories for all of NPR's broadcast and digital platforms. Since joining NPR in 2013, Little has directed and edited many of the network's signature investigative projects.

Under his leadership, stories from the investigations team have won some of the top honors in investigative journalism, including multiple Peabody Awards, Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards, Edward R. Murrow Awards, Investigative Reporters and Editors Awards, and the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting.

Before joining NPR, Little spent 15 years as a reporter and editor at The Baltimore Sun. From 2010-2012 he managed all of the organization's main newsgathering departments. Little started at the paper as a reporter in 1998 and covered breaking news and enterprise stories across the country and around the world, including the 2001 terrorist attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the war in Iraq, and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. His stories about trauma care in combat prompted the Department of Defense to distribute tourniquets to every deployed soldier and Marine worldwide. He's won numerous local and national journalism awards, including the George Polk Award for his investigative reporting in Iraq. Prior to The Baltimore Sun, Little reported for The Virginian-Pilot and The Carroll County Times.