S-R Wins Top Award For Hanford Series Paper Also Receives 5 Prizes For Excellence In Photography
The Spokesman-Review has received national awards for exposing waste and mismanagement at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and for excellence in photography.
The George Polk award for environmental reporting went to Jim Lynch and Karen Dorn Steele, it was announced Monday in New York.
Their series “Wasteland,” which followed a six-month investigation, revealed that lucrative contracts with private companies reward inefficiency.
After five years and $7.5 billion, little at Hanford, one of the country’s most polluted places, has been cleaned up.
Top U.S. Department of Energy officials suspect at least one in every three tax dollars is being wasted.
The National Press Photographers Association named the Spokane newspaper best for its size at using photographs on a daily basis.
The association also gave The Spokesman-Review four other awards for photo editing.
The only other Pacific Northwest papers honored were the Tacoma News-Tribune, with two awards, and the Eugene (Ore.) RegisterGuard, with one.
“I am particularly pleased with these awards because I think they speak to the consistent high quality of work done by the staff,” Managing Editor Chris Peck said.
“The Polk award is one of the biggies in journalism,” he said. “Many of the winners go on to win Pulitzers and other major awards. It’s quite a mark to play in the company of The New York Times.”
The annual Polk awards were established in 1949 to honor George Polk, a CBS reporter killed while covering the Greek civil war.
Winners, chosen by a faculty-alumni committee at Long Island University, will receive their awards April 5 in New York.
Other Polk winners include:
Dave Davis and Joan Mazzolini of The Plain Dealer in Cleveland for how Ohio regulators have failed to protect the public from bad medical care.
Steven Emerson and Martin Koughan of SAE Productions for exposing, in a public television documentary, the existence of a radical network bent on holy war inside the United States.
Philip Hamburger for career achievement with 55 years of reporting and criticism at The New Yorker magazine.
Metropolitan reporting: David Armstrong, Shelley Murphy and Stephen Kurkjian for a series in The Boston Globe on hazards of unrepaired and uninspected elevators and escalators.
Local reporting: Sonia Nazario for Los Angeles Times stories on children suffering from hunger in Southern California suburbs.
National reporting: Joel Brinkley, Deborah Sontag and Stephen Engelberg of The New York Times for a series on disarray in the federal immigration agency.
Political reporting: Joe Stephens of the Kansas City Star for exposing corruption and patronage in awarding riverboat gambling contracts.
Education reporting: Olive Talley of the Dallas Morning News for reports on shady dealings at Texas A&M University.
Network TV reporting: John Martin, Walt Bogdanich and Keith Summa of ABC for reports that cigarette makers manipulate nicotine content.
Foreign reporting: Barbara Demick of The Philadelphia Inquirer for stories on the siege of Sarajevo as seen from one street.
Magazine reporting: Allan Nairn of The Nation for stories linking the leader of right-wing Haitian killers to the CIA.