An in-depth year-long look at the beef industry by a team of Kansas City Star journalists published in 2012 titled “Beef’s Raw Edges” continues to rack up the awards.
The latest is the Sigma Delta Chi award for public service in online journalism on a newspaper-affiliated website for the story by veteran reporters Mike McGraw and Alan Bavely.
Photojournalist Todd Feeback, who recently left the Star for KCPT-TV, was also involved with the story, but was not mentioned by the Star in reporting the latest award. The series was done in collaboration with Harvest Public Media.
The Sigma Chi award comes on the heels of a National Headliners first-place award last week.
In January, the Kansas City Star’s parent, McClatchy Company, announced it had awarded one of its 10 “President’s Awards for Journalism Excellence in 2012″ to McGraw and Bavley for the series.
NEWSPAPER SWEEPS PIECE
These stories are like sweeps stories on TV. You know they will strike an emotional chord and win awards so you do them and re-do them. Of course we want perfection in our food processing but perfection is never possible when people are involved. And there are a lot of people involved in commercial food processing. Imagine the awards they could win if they put that effort into a story idea that hadn’t been done before.