Skip to main content

News

Search News

Topics
Date Published Between

For the Media

For media inquiries, call CWA Communications at 202-434-1168 or email comms@cwa-union.org. To read about CWA Members, Leadership or Industries, visit our About page.

The Newspaper Guild-CWA Announces Broun Award Winners

Washington, D.C.--Andy Furillo of the Sacramento Bee has been awarded the 2002 Broun Award for his two-part series on the 30-year decline of a Sacramento neighborhood, Franklin Villa, from a flourishing community of tidy homes to blocks of crime-ridden, substandard housing.

The judges called Furillo's work a "classic example of investigative reporting" in the best tradition of Heywood Broun.

The $5,000 journalism prize is awarded annually by The Newspaper Guild CWA and this year will be presented at a banquet May 6 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Washington.

Also to be honored are two additional entries recognized for "substantial distinction." In the print category, a five-part series reported for the Winston-Salem Journal by Kevin Begos, Danielle Deaver and John Railey and submitted by state editor Scott Sexton on the inner workings of North Carolina's eugenics board and its forced sterilization of some 7,600 people won acclaim by the judges.

Jamitra Haskell, reporter for WNYC Radio Rookies, won praise for her report, "Tracking," which chronicled the New York City public school system's academic tracking program and its adverse effect on students. The "substantial distinction" awards include a cash prize of $1,000.

The award winners were selected from 125 entries from across the United States and Canada.

For his series, Furillo pored over decades of property records and pounded the pavement to interview tenants, absentee landlords and others to learn how the Franklin Villa neighborhood could have deteriorated so dramatically. He opened his entry with these words:

"Moving day came, but Cheryl Daniel never got the key to her apartment in south Sacramento's Franklin Villa. The landlord, she said, 'told me to go in through the window.' So Daniel crawled through a side window, into a place filled with piles of trash, wires jutting from electrical sockets and mold in the refrigerator. Upstairs, the electricity didn't work at all."

Furillo's reporting compelled the Sacramento City County to vote to proceed with a municipal takeover of Franklin Villa and to begin reconstruction of the area.

Judging this year's entries were Phil Dine, a national correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch; Trudy Lieberman, contributing editor, author and director of the Center for Consumer Health Choice at Consumers Union; Bill Marimow, editor and senior vice president, the Baltimore Sun; and Acel Moore, associate editor and columnist, Philadelphia Inquirer.

Broadcast judges were Frank Koller, CBC correspondent for National Radio News; Joe Krebs, morning anchor, WRC-NBC News, Washington, D.C.; and Julie Wright, on-camera anchor for WTTG, Fox 5, Washington, D.C.

Chairing the panels was Bob Jordan, retired Boston Globe columnist and past president of the Boston Newspaper Guild.

The Broun Award is named after Heywood Broun, a crusading columnist and most prominent founder of the Guild, who believed that individual journalists have the power to cause social change. The award was first presented for work done in 1941 and is given annually in recognition of Aindividual journalistic achievement by members of the working media, particularly if it helps right a wrong or correct an injustice.

###

Press Contact

CWA Communications