Vermont Public Radio has been honored with national awards for its news coverage – for community engagement, commentary, and multimedia presentation.
“As a public broadcaster, we are accountable to the community we serve,” said VPR News Director John Dillon. “We are honored to receive these awards because they go to the heart of VPR’s mission to provide an essential and trusted independent voice for news and information in our region.”
Associated Press Media Editors chose VPR’s Traces Project for its Journalism Excellence Award for community engagement. Traces is a digital project at VPR.net that asked those who had direct experience with addiction, whether they had lost a loved one, lost touch with a friend, or fought their own addiction, to share their stories.
The AMPE Journalism Excellence Awards honor superior journalism and innovation among newspapers, radio, television and digital news sites in the U.S. and Canada. The awards seek to promote excellence by recognizing work that is innovative, well-written and incisively reported and has outstanding multimedia. Other winners in the Community Engagement category were the Seattle Times, Alabama Media Group and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. A full list of winners is available here.
VPR was also honored with two national awards from Public Radio News Directors, Inc. for its coverage in 2014. The winning coverage includes:
Best Multimedia Presentation: Campaign 2014 (2nd Place)
Commentary: Madeleine Kunin: On Silence And Suicide (2nd Place)
PRNDI handed out 130 awards to public radio newsrooms on June 27 at the organization's annual conference in Salt Lake City. The awards included recognition for excellent journalism produced in 2014 in new arts and sports feature categories as well as or multimedia, nationally edited, and student work. The competition was fierce this year with over 1,100 entries from public radio newsrooms across the country.
The PRNDI Awards is the only national competition devoted to rewarding outstanding local public radio news. VPR competed in the Large Newsroom category with flagship public radio stations including WBUR in Boston, WNYC in New York, and KQED in San Francisco. A full list of award winners, along with links to the winning pieces, can be found here.
