The Atlantic's Molly Ball Wins the Newhouse School's 2012 Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting

Washington, D.C.--The Atlantic's Molly Ball won the 2012 Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting, it was announced last night by Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. 

Ball was recognized for her in-depth, comprehensive coverage of the 2012 election--from President Obama's decisive ground game to the epic campaign for marriage equality. The entry of five stories, submitted as examples of Ball's work throughout the election, included:

• March 15th's "Has Mitt Romney Run a Lousy Campaign?"
• March 29th's "If Obamacare Is Overturned, Can Democrats Recover?"
• October 1st's "Meet the Ohio Voters Who Are Killing Romney's Campaign"
• October 24th's "Obama's Edge: The Ground Game That Could Put Him Over the Top"
• December 11th's "The Marriage Plot: Inside This Year's Epic Campaign for Gay Equality"

The Toner Prize is part of The Robin Toner Program in Political Reporting by the Newhouse School. The program honors the late Robin Toner, a graduate of Syracuse University who was the first woman to be national political correspondent for The New York Times. 

The 2012 competition for the Toner Prize drew 118 entries from media organizations across the country, from national outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN to community news organizations such as WCNC-TV in Charlotte, N.C., and the online St. Louis Beacon. For more information, please visit: http://newhouse.syr.edu/Newsroom/read_news.cfm?id=905

Ball was nominated by Atlantic senior editor Garance Franke-Ruta, her editor at the time. 

Ball joined The Atlantic in September 2011 from Politico, where she covered the GOP nomination fight and the 2010 midterm congressional elections. Before joining Politico in 2010, she was a reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Las Vegas Sun, covering the 2008 presidential race. Ball has also reported for newspapers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Cambodia, as well as The New York Times and The Washington Post. She is a graduate of Yale University and was a 2009 recipient of the Knight-Wallace journalism fellowship at the University of Michigan. 

About The Atlantic
Since its founding in 1857 as a magazine about "the American Idea" that would be of "no party or clique," The Atlantic has been at the forefront of brave thinking in journalism. One of the first magazines to launch on the Web in the early 1990s, The Atlantic has continued to help shape the national debate across print, digital, and event platforms. With the addition of its news- and opinion-tracking site, TheAtlanticWire.com, and now TheAtlanticCities.com on global cities, The Atlantic is a multimedia forum on the most-critical issues of our times, from politics, business, urban affairs, and the economy, to technology, arts, and culture. The Atlantic is the flagship property of Washington, D.C.-based publisher Atlantic Media Company.