Electric Fishwrap

Last night was the SPJ Excellence in journalism ceremony by Western Washington SPJ. Many of my colleagues at the Skagit Valley Herald earned awards for their work last year. The paper as a whole came out with 13 awards.

I was on the SVH staff team that earned a third-place showing in the environment and energy category with our series Skagit Warming. This is a highly competitive region, with papers from five states vying for awards (Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Alaska).

Unfortunately the two reporters who got the most, Josh Lintereur (four, including two first place) and Franny White (three, with two first place), are either gone or leaving soon. That’s turnover in a small community daily. It seems like there’s a lot more turnover here than anywhere else I’ve been. Maybe it’s because people who live here are transplants from somewhere else. Franny and Josh both moved back to their home towns to work.

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Reporters at my paper spent a few grueling months last year looking into how global warming will impact our small corner of the world. The result was the Skagit Warming, an eight-part series (my contribution here).

The series won first place in the Pioneer Newspapers’ annual Recognizing Excellence award. I love group projects, so it was a lot of fun diving into this issue. My only regret is I didn’t produce multimedia for this project. I can’t complain, though, because right after I had concluded the reporting on this series, the editors started having me do audio for other stories I worked on. We’ll be ready for the next project.