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Saturday March 13, 2010
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Saturday March 13, 2010
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The Belleville News-Democrat has won the prestigious George Polk Award for its series "Trapped in Tamms."
The series detailed abuses of prisoners, some of them mentally ill, held in solitary confinement for more than 10 years at Illinois' only "supermax" prison. The award citation stated, "In the wake of the articles, Amnesty International pressed the governor to ease conditions at the prison, 48 inmates were selected for transfer, and reforms were proposed by the Illinois corrections department director."The stories, published in 2009, were written by reporters George Pawlaczyk and Beth Hundsdorfer. The won in the category of Local Reporting.The George Polk Awards, administered by Long Island University since 1949, honors the memory of George Polk, a CBS correspondent killed in 1948 while covering the civil war in Greece.Past winners include: Seymour Hersh, Walter Cronkite, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Edward R. Murrow, Ted Koppel and Christiane Amanpour.For more information on the awards and a full list of 2009 recipients, visit www.brooklyn.liu.edu/polk.The awards will be presented during a ceremony April 8 at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. Tom Brokaw of NBC News will announce the winners.The News & Observer's year-long investigation of former North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley has been named among six finalists for Harvard University's 2010 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting.
Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government administers the award, which will be bestowed March 23 at a ceremony at Harvard University and comes with a $25,000 cash prize.The press release announcing The News & Observer's selection among the finalists described The News & Observer's work as exposing "pay-to-pay politics at its worst.""Their reporting revealed how Easley accepted numerous unreported gifts from supporters in return for political influence and 'sweet deals.' The facts uncovered in this series launched state and federal criminal investigations, led to resignations and firings, exposed election law violations and spurred government reforms."You can follow The News & Observer's ongoing coverage, titled "Executive Privilege" here and learn more about the prestigious Goldsmith Prize here.The Belleville News-Democrat has won a prestigious national journalism award -- the 2010 Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting Award -- for its stories about the treatment of prisoners at the Tamms supermax prison, Illinois' only supermax facility.
The award is presented by the John Jay College for Criminal Justice at City University in New York. The series, "Trapped in Tamms," by reporters George Pawlaczyk and Beth Hundsdorfer, won in the series division. The contest, in its fifth year, carries a $1,000 award in each division. A past winner, The Wall Street Journal, referred to the contest as the "Pulitzer Prize of criminal justice journalism." Other past winners include The Denver Post, Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the San Jose Mercury News. The investigative series and follow-up stories reported that mentally ill inmates, including some incarcerated for relatively minor crimes, were held in solitary confinement for more than 10 years. The stories also outlined the difficulties faced by mentally ill prisoners in trying to conform to the supermax lockup's extreme discipline and isolation. The articles led to reforms at the prison, which human rights advocates compared to the federal prison where terrorist suspects were held at Guantanamo. "The winning entries demonstrate that even in an era of news industry cost-cutting, investigative and in-depth criminal justice journalism continues to be an important focus across the nation," said Stephen Handelman, director of John Jay's Center on Media, Crime and Justice. "We received a record number of entries this year from both large and small outlets." The award will be presented Feb. 1 at a luncheon in conjunction with the fifth annual Harry Frank Guggenheim Symposium on criminal justice reform.The online sports sections produced by The Miami Herald and The News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash., are among the best in the industry, according to the Associated Press Sports Editors.
APSE, which has been judging and honoring the best newspaper sports sections and the best sports writing since 1981, this year took a critical look at the online sports sections of 100 different newspaper websites.APSE named The Miami Herald's online sports efforts among the Top 10 in the nation for those online newspaper sports sections with more than 1 million unique visitors in a month. The News Tribune was among the Top 10 in the nation among online sports sections with fewer than 1 million unique visitors a month.See the APSE press release here.The Miami Herald's Jack Dolan, Matthew Haggman and Rob Barry won one of the nation's most prestigious business journalism awards Oct. 7 for revealing the state's failure to police Florida's troubled mortgage industry.
The reporters captured the gold medal in the Barlett & Steele Awards for Investigative Business Journalism for their 2008 series, "Borrowers Betrayed", showing that Florida regulators allowed thousands of people with criminal histories -- including armed robbers and racketeers -- to work in the mortgage industry since 2000. The series was edited by Investigations Editor Michael Sallah.The award, presented by the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism at Arizona State University, comes with a $5,000 prize.The four-part series showed that regulators failed to alert police to crooked mortgage brokerages and dropped investigations into shoddy operations while the state had the highest rate of mortgage fraud in the country."The Herald really nailed this investigation, uncovering a unique angle on the theme of the year,'' the judges said. "It found a staggering degree of nonfeasance on the part of the state, bringing perpetrators to life and showing the human impact of misdeeds.''The reporters will be honored at a banquet on Jan. 6 at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Runners up for the award included Bloomberg Markets magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Seattle Times and ABA Journal.A McClatchy series about the Guantanamo Bay detention center, "Guantanamo: Beyond the Law," was declared the top investigative project among large websites by the Online News Association Oct. 3 in San Francisco during its annual convention.
The 2008 project, by reporters Tom Lasseter and Matthew Schofield, was based on interviews with 66 former Guantanamo detainees, who recounted how they were treated at Guantanamo and at the U.S. detention center at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Lasseter and Schofield traveled to eight countries over 11 months to research the stories.The investigation of the detention system created after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks found that the U.S. imprisoned innocent men, subjected them to abuse, stripped them of their legal rights and allowed Islamic militants to turn the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba into a school for jihad.The online project totaled more than 100,000 words and was published in full at McClatchyDC.com, the website of the McClatchy Washington Bureau. It consisted of 12 stories that summarized the reporters' findings, 65 stories on the interviewed former prisoners and photographs and video by Travis Heying, a photographer with McClatchy's Wichita Eagle.The internet presentation also included a searchable database and interactive graphics designed by McClatchy Interactive's staff in Raleigh N.C., graphics by the staff of McClatchy-Tribune Information Services and an archive of relevant documents. A shorter version was distributed as a five-day series to McClatchy's 30 newspapers.The full project can be viewed at www.mcclatchydc.com/detainees.The Fresno Bee's E.J. Schultz won top honors for overall statehouse coverage from Capitolbeat, the national association of state capitol reporters and editors.
Schultz won first place for beat reporting among wire services and newspapers over 75,000 circulation. Also honored in that category were statehouse reporters from the Associated Press in California and Ohio, the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times.Schultz has been The Fresno Bee's state Capitol bureau reporter since 2006. He joined the newspaper as a business reporter in 2004.The awards were announced this month at the association's annual conference in Indianapolis.The Miami Herald and The Kansas City Star both received awards from the National Association of Black Journalists Aug. 8 Tampa, Fla., at the group's annual convention.
Miami Herald Caribbean correspondent Jacqueline Charles was honored as the best international newspaper reporter for her 2008 coverage of Haiti, "A Trail of Grief."Chalres, a 15-year veteran Miami Herald reporter was recognized for her compelling and comprehensive coverage of last year's series of tropical storms that devastated several cities throughout Haiti.A Kansas City Star series about Kansas City's murderous August 2008 won the news series category for newspapers with circulation greater than 150,000. The two-day series, "Murder’s Big Month," beat out six other finalists –- including entries from The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune.Kansas City Star reporters Chrstine Vendel, Lee Hill Kavanaugh and Malcom Garcia wrote the series, published in September 2008.One article took readers along as detectives investigated cases. Others showed the effect the killings had on families that lost loved ones that August when the city saw a record 21 homicides. Nineteen of the victims were black.The National Association of Black Journalists is one of the four major minority journalists associations holding national conventions this summer. The McClatchy Company is a corporate sponsor of each convention.A series of investigations into how several quasi-governmental organizations in Kentucky spend tax dollars has earned the Lexington Herald-Leader a Public Service Award from the Associated Press Managing Editors Association.
APME, an association of editors at AP's 1,500 member newspapers in the United States and newspapers served by the Canadian Press in Canada, recognizes journalism excellence with annual awards in five categories.This year's winners were selected during a meeting of the association's board of directors in New York. The awards will be presented during the group's annual conference Oct. 28 to 30 in St. Louis.The Lexington Herald-Leader won the Public Service Award given to newspapers with a circulation of 40,000 to 150,000. The Herald-Leader's "It's Your Money" series, which began late last year, has examined spending at Blue Grass Airport, the Lexington Public Library, Kentucky League of Cities and Kentucky Association of Counties.The stories revealed that the groups had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on questionable travel, meals and other expenses.After the initial airport stories appeared, the director of the airport resigned, as did several top members of his staff.In addition, State Auditor Crit Luallen completed an audit of the airport and issued 28 recommendations to help other groups that receive taxpayer money avoid similar situations. Luallen also has launched an audit of the League and KACo.The Lexington Fayette Urban County Government is conducting an audit of the public library. In July, the top two officers on the library's board were replaced by the mayor; the board then fired the agency's chief executive.Two Sacramento Bee reporters have won a national award from the Society of Professional Journalists for their work uncovering problems and errors at Sacramento County's Child Protective Services department.
Marjie Lundstrom and Sam Stanton were among three recipients of the organization's 2009 First Amendment Award for the two-part series "Unprotected" and subsequent coverage that, the judges noted, led to a grand jury investigation. The stories can be viewed at www.sacbee.com/cps.Along with the other two winners, The Oklahoman/NewsOK.com and the Detroit Free Press, Lundstrom and Stanton were "recognized for their extraordinarily strong efforts to preserve and strengthen the First Amendment."For the CPS series, reporting involved the first test of a new open records law that required release of otherwise private child welfare records whenever a child dies. Lundstrom wrote some of her own legal filings and appeared in court to secure access to records."Joining forces with veteran Bee reporter Stanton," a news release announcing the award said, "the two fought to hold the system accountable."
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