Thursday, March 07, 2019

Palestine Herald-Press in Texas wins Scripps Howard Award for opinion with 'What Are They Hiding?' package

Multi-platform reporting and news outlet collaboration are big trends among winners of the 2018 Scripps Howard Awards, announced yesterday by the Scripps Howard Foundation. Here are the winners with rural resonance:

The Palestine Herald-Press in Texas brought home the prize in the Opinion category for "What Are They Hiding?", editorials that examined two issues with local impact: how an athletic commission treated a football player, and the state’s seeming rush to execute death-row prisoners. The judges commented: "In their clarity and detail, the editorials would be worthy of the best efforts of the largest metro newspapers in America. The fact that they were all published by a small Texas paper with less than a 10,000 circulation is an example of journalism that speaks truth to power when doing so could invite truly unpleasant consequences." Community Newspaper Holdings owns the paper.

The Knoxville News Sentinel , owned by Gannett Co., won the Community Journalism category for "The Devastation of TVA’s Coal Ash Spill", which covered the struggle of workers who were sickened or killed cleaning up the worst coal-ash spill in U.S. history. "Reporter Jamie Satterfield delivers excellent watchdog work that truly holds the powerful accountable," judges wrote. "Her investigation is deeply reported and swarms all the important angles. The series of stories were well sourced and contained videos with on-the-record accounts that hit viewers between the eyes. Satterfield's extraordinary efforts result in change-inducing and life-saving journalism."

The foundation, the philanthropic arm of E.W. Scripps Co., will present more than $170,000 in prize money to the winners on April 18 in Cincinnati. The awards show will be livestreamed on YouTube and Facebook and rebroadcast on April 21 on Newsy.

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