Health-care overhaul legislation may or may not win House approval in the coming days. But one thing is sure — vast sums of money and lobbying time were spent by interests on all sides of the year-long debate.

And for its coverage of that nexus of money and influence on one of the most important pieces of legislation taken up by Congress in decades, NPR was awarded the Joan Shorenstein Barone Award "for excellence in Washington-based reporting of Congressional and political affairs" at the Radio-TV Correspondents' Association dinner in the nation's capital Wednesday night.

Called "Dollar Politics," the 2009 investigative series examined how money and access have taken on an oversized role in the legislative process.

 

While the series bore NPR's characteristic stamp of strong story-telling, the journalists involved also tried some inventive approaches.

Perhaps the most imaginative was, instead of focusing a camera lens on the typical subjects in a Senate hearing room, i.e. the senators, an NPR photographer instead pointed the camera at the audience in the room. Then on our NPR.org website and through social media like Twitter we asked members of the public for their help in identifying the health-care lobbyists and players in the room.

Meanwhile, old-fashioned investigative reporting work, like sifting through reams of campaign contribution data and lobbying disclosure forms, contributed to a well-documented series that cast light on how money helped us get where we are now, with legislation almost no one is deeply satisfied with but which somehow protects the interests of key health-care stakeholders.

Congratulations to everyone who worked on the series and shares a piece of this award. It's well deserved.

Update at 7:30 a.m. ET. The NPR staffers involved in the project included:

— Reporters Peter Overby and Andrea Seabrook.
— Editor Brian Duffy.
— Digital media reporters/editors Robert Benincasa, Keith Jenkins and Nelson Hsu.
— Photo editor Heather Murphy.

And, courtesy of C-SPAN's video library, here is video of Andrea and Peter accepting the award last night: