KU News Release

Ottawa Herald, Washington County News share Burton Marvin award

LAWRENCE — The Ottawa Herald and the Washington County News are the winners of the 2008 Burton W. Marvin Kansas News Enterprise Award.

Given since 1974 by the William Allen White Foundation, the award recognizes outstanding reporting by newspapers in Kansas. The award is named in honor of the foundation’s first director and a former dean of the University of Kansas’ journalism school. The award will be presented Feb. 6 during William Allen White Day activities at KU.

“We are again happy to honor quality journalism in Kansas,” said Ann Brill, dean of the journalism school. “The winners this year represent the impact that great storytelling can have in a community.”

The Ottawa Herald was honored for its comprehensive weeklong series that ran in early October 2008 on the rerouting and renovation of U.S. 59 from a two-lane to a four-lane highway between Ottawa and Lawrence. The new road is to be more than just a highway. It will be a critical transportation link in eastern Kansas.

The contest judges noted, “In committing all of page one, as well as necessary inside pages, the Ottawa Herald told the story from beginning to end, good and bad, in a one-week period. Ottawa readers got the full import of the complicated and mixed emotions surrounding the area’s most massive transportation project in the last four decades.”

The news project took nearly a year of planning and three months of intense coverage by two reporters, a photographer and an intern. Staff credited with contributing to the series were: Vickie Moss, Ottawa Herald managing editor, project leader; Tommy Felts, page designer; Elliot Sutherland, photographer; and Moss, Jenalea Myers, Jodie Garcia and Cleon Rickel, reporters.

The Washington County News, a weekly publication, used storytelling to unravel a mystery whose end was unexplained. Reporter Tom Parker thoroughly explored a story that began as a manhunt and ended as a suicide. The two-part series, “The Final Journey of Robert Glenn Bennett,” appeared in the Jan. 3 and Jan. 10, 2008, issues of the Washington County News.

According to judges’ comment, “Parker found sources at every waypoint along a meandering path and turned what could have been a simple, eight-paragraph story into a compelling drama of psychological disintegration. His vivid writing, published in two consecutive weeks, was in the finest tradition of the Kansas News Enterprise Award.”

KU’s journalism school observes William Allen White Day annually in February to coincide with White’s birthday. This year, the White Foundation trustees chose Tom Curley, president and chief executive officer of the Associated Press, to receive the citation, presented annually since 1950 to journalists who exemplify the ideals of William Allen White. KU’s William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications is named in White’s honor. White (1868-1944) was a nationally influential Kansas editor and publisher.

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