Bob CollinsIt’s award season on Planet Journalism. Newsrooms all over the country spend much of December submitting awards. It’s a small cottage industry for some awards organizations who make a few bucks on entry fees. In return, stations and newspapers get something to promote when the awards start rolling in in the spring. Most of the awards aren’t worth much more.
The Peabody Award is not one of those, and today two area news organizations got one.
American Public Media — perhaps you’ve heard of it — won for The Promised Land with host Majora Carter. The program explored “visionaries among us — men and women with innovative ideas about changing lives and transforming communities. You may find them in the far-flung corners of the world or right down the street.”
Here’s an example:
The unit returned this week from the Gulf Coast, where it was researching a look at the area one year after the big BP oil spill…
KSTP TV won a Peabody for “Who Killed Doc?” The station investigated the death of a Minnesota sailor and found that “commanders ignored warnings, botched investigations, and failed to protect service members on their own base – where they should have been the safest.” (Find it here.)
By the way, public media won 19 of the awards. Many of them were funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Under a House bill passed a few weeks ago, stations would not be allowed to purchase these kinds of programs.
Here’s the complete list of winners.
