News Leaders Assn. winners and finalists include statewide nonprofits and a university project; climate change featured

Nonprofit news organizations with statewide missions, and thus a rural impact, were among the winners and finalists in this year's awards from the News Leaders Association, a recent merger of the American Society of News Editors and Associated Press Managing Editors. A university project also won a major award, reflecting the growing role of journalism schools in providing news coverage. 

The First Amendment Award went to Ed Williams of Searchlight New Mexico for its investigation of turmoil and cover-ups at the state's Children, Youth and Families Department. The judges said, "Ed Williams had a hard job – how do you find messages that are disappearing? – but his cultivation of sources led to a shocking abuse of public records law and the public's right to know." Another statewide nonprofit, Iowa Capital Dispatch, was a finalist for its pursuit of public records.

Two other statewide nonprofits, the Texas Tribune and Mountain State Spotlight in West Virginia, were a joint finalist with ProPublica for a "remarkable journalistic effort [that] turned a complicated data set of pollution records from the EPA into an easy-to-access interactive map that allows anyone to input an address and find out the toxic air pollution level and the estimated cancer risk in the area." The news outlets "sent postcards to affected communities and posted fliers in churches, libraries and other gathering spots. It is no wonder that the EPA took notice and responded." The project is the subject of a webinar at noon ET Tuesday, April 13.

The Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland was named Punch Sulzberger Innovator of the Year for “Printing Hate,” which the judges called "an exceptional exercise in journalistic accountability and a memory project for the ages. Working with students at five historically Black colleges and universities and Black newspaper publishers, put "the racist coverage of horrific lynchings" in a database that "allows users to filter varying types of harmful coverage — including reporting that attempted to justify, and even organize, acts of state-abetted racial terror." It resulted in removal of a rural Maryland publisher from the Hall of Fame of the Maryland-D.C.-Delaware Press Association.

Climate change was in the NLA spotlight. Each year the NLA's Batten Medal recognizes "coverage of an issue that presents an urgent challenge to the United States." This year's issue was climate change. The Los Angeles Times won for an October story showing how California undercounts deaths from extreme heat "even as heat waves become more frequent and more deadly."

Other finalists were The Post and Courier, which explained how the fate of South Carolina's Low Country is connected to rising temperatures and melting glaciers in Greenland, and Bloomberg News, for "Methane Menace," which revealed many sources (including leaky oil and gas wells) of the gas that dissipates much more quickly than carbon dioxide but has a greenhouse effect 80 times as potent. "Judges were stunned that such an obvious problem had been left unfixed for so long," NLA said. "The fact that the reporters had to gather their own data and then analyze it was also unique."

The Frank A. Blethen Award for Local Accountability Reporting, named for the publisher of The Seattle Times, the Yakima Herald and the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin, went to the Tampa Bay Times for "a classic watchdog investigative report" on how toxic dust inside a local lead smelter "poisoned employees and their families for years." For all the winners, go here.