Students from the University of Missouri and Arizona State University won the Society of American Business Editors and Writers Best in Business contest for student work.

Theo Keith, a senior at Missouri, won in the professional publication category for a story he wrote while interning last summer at the Detroit bureau of Bloomberg News.

On his blog, Keith wrote, "I’m honored to win the award for reporting on a major issue in Detroit. It’s no secret that I hope to return to the Motor City during my career to report on the news and people that matter so much to me."

Jennifer Johnson, a former Arizona State graduate student who now interns for Bloomberg News, won in the student publication category for a story she wrote for the Cronkite News Service.

Keith's story focused on how autoworkers were now struggling to make ends meet after the loss of the jobs bank, which guaranteed their pay when they had been laid off while a factory was being revamped for a new model.

Keith wrote, "The jobs bank, which had a combined 25,000 Ford, GM and Chrysler workers at its peak in the early 1990s, was originally designed to retain trained workers who were temporarily displaced by productivity or business cycles. The program later became a symbol of the benefits union workers received as the U.S. government debated approving funds to save the industry."

Johnson wrote about how a copper mining company seeking to dig a mine near a national forest in Arizona had struck agreements with a nearby town, nature groups and a rock climbing club so that they would not oppose the project with the federal government.

Keith is a senior from Saginaw, Mich. majoring in broadcast journalism and political science. In addition to interning at Bloomberg, he has also interned for "Your World with Neil Cavuto" and his hometown paper, the Saginaw News.

Johnson now interns in Bloomberg's New York bureau on the stocks team after interning in Chicago for Bloomberg last summer. At Arizona State, she was a graduate assistant at the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism. She has worked as a freelance writer for the St. Louis Business Journal and West Newsmagazine in St. Louis.

She also spent a year working as a political assistant at the European Union Parliament in Brussels, Belgium.

The winners last year were students from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.