Herald honored for U.S. 59 series

LAWRENCE — A comprehensive look at construction of an improved U.S. 59 won reporting honors for The Ottawa Herald.

The Herald and the Washington County News each received the 2008 Burton W. Marvin Kansas News Enterprise Award. The awards were presented by the William Allen White Foundation Friday at the University of Kansas.

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

The award recognizes outstanding reporting by newspapers in Kansas and has been given since 1974.

The Herald was honored for a 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.

“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,” the contest judges said. “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.

Also receiving the Burton W. Marvin award this year was The Washington County News, a weekly publication. 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.

The Herald also won the Burton W. Marvin award in 2006 for a report on sexual harrassment accusations against former Ottawa Middle School principal Dale Fox.