Today’s column is dedicated to our newsroom, a group of dedicated journalists who were honored last week for outstanding journalism — including two of the top awards in the state of Florida.
The Bradenton Herald team was honored with both the James K. Batten Award for Distinguished Public Service and the Gene Miller Award for Investigative Reporting by the South Florida Society of Professional Journalists.
We strive every day to uphold our mission statement, which opens with this promise: “Our commitment is to seek out the truth, report it fairly and accurately, and to embrace the sense of community that defines Manatee County.”
But we rarely take the time to celebrate our successes, consumed instead by the next breaking news item for Bradenton.com, the story that needs more sources, the next photo assignment, seemingly endless deadlines. So this is a moment to cherish.
The Batten Award, named in honor of the renowned late chairman of Knight-Ridder, “recognizes reporting that corrects a wrong, brings an issue to light or adds significantly to the public debate.” Our health and social services reporter could easily be named Donna “Batten Award” Wright.
She led the way in our winning entry, “Surviving the Squeeze.” The judges awarded Wright and the Herald staff Third Place for all media throughout Florida. (The Miami Herald placed first; the Fort Myers News-Press took second.) We launched the series last October, looking for smarter ways to help our community live through this economic meltdown. The judges wrote:
“The Batten Award is for public service and that’s what the Herald’s series delivered. It demonstrated how the economic meltdown was affecting local citizens and outlined what services and options were available to people in trouble. It also moved readers to help their neighbors and replenish stocks at food banks and the like.”
In the investigative reporting award for small newspapers, named in honor of late Miami Herald reporter and editor Gene Miller, Bradenton Herald reporters Robert Napper, Natalie Alund and Duane Marsteller won First Place for “Loophole Exposed in Predator Law.”
Napper began digging into an arrest report when his background check found that the suspect was a convicted sex offender. What Napper discovered led to a statewide critique of how jurisdictions are alerted to a sex offender’s past. The suspect had been arrested for allegedly molesting a patient at a Bradenton mental hospital — where sheriff’s deputies had taken him, but not told the hospital about his past. The Herald investigation, joined by Marsteller and Alund, revealed a loophole in the sexual predators law that doesn’t require agencies to notify nursing homes, hospitals or other facilities when a sexual offender is taken there.
This contest category calls for “original reporting that exposes a wrong or promotes understanding of a problem, issue, or subject in the public interest.” In honoring the loophole series, the judges wrote:
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