This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Aug. 31, 2009 - We have two pieces of good news on prizes.
Congratulations to Beacon reporter Dale Singer. He won first place for in-depth reporting in a contest sponsored by Capitolbeat, the national organization for statehouse reporters and editors. Dale's winning entry, "De-ja Vu All Over Again," was one of several articles that explained the complicated but important debate over funding construction of a nuclear power plant in Missouri. AmerenUE eventually dropped its push to change Missouri's prohibition on charging ratepayers for construction work in progress.
Recently, Dale was selected for a week-long Knight fellowship on economic reporting at the University of Maryland.
Also, just today we learned that the Beacon is a finalist in the General Excellence category (micro division) of the Online Journalism Awards, sponsored by the Online News Association. As implied, this award is for overall achievement rather than for a particular story or series. The winner will be announced Oct. 3 at the ONA convention.
The micro size category covers sites with up to 100,000 monthly unique visitors. Other finalists in the micro category were the Center for Public Integrity and Gotham Gazette, both longstanding news organizations. General excellence finalists in other size categories include:
Small - MediaStorm, PolitiFact, ProPublica
Medium - The Daily Beast, LasVegasSun.com, NewsOK.com, spokesman.com
Large - bbcnews.com, nytimes.com, Wired.com, washingtonpost.com