By Larry Barszewski
The Coastal Star walked away with 15 awards in the annual Florida Press Club competition, including a top award for in-depth reporting. The awards were announced at a Jan. 14 ceremony in Daytona Beach.The paper received the prestigious Lucy Morgan Award for In-Depth Reporting for its look at south Palm Beach County’s aging condos following the 2021 collapse of the 12-story Champlain Towers South condominium in Surfside. The Classes B-C award is given to publications with under 40,000 circulation.
The award was one of three first-place prizes the paper received in its class. Coastal Star reporter Joe Capozzi won the other two first-place awards, one for a story about the heavy pace of burials at the Delray Beach Memorial Gardens Municipal Cemetery during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, and the other in the public safety writing category for articles about bicycle-riding dangers, regulations and enforcement on State Road A1A.
The Lucy Morgan Award is the third for The Coastal Star, which also received the award in 2015 for a package about the 1984 Karen Slattery murder and the status of her killer on Death Row, and in 2014 for an article about lessons officials learned from the coastal damage done by Hurricane Sandy.
Judges gave high marks this year for the paper’s report on aging condos, a staff effort led by reporter Joel Engelhardt. The work in August 2021 also won the top in-depth reporting award from the separate Florida Press Association 2022 Weekly Newspaper Contest.
“A journalist’s sacred duty is to distill the critical, but potentially deadly boring details in a way that connects our common humanity. I’m happy to say this has been accomplished,” one Florida Press Club judge wrote of the paper’s entry. “This is a towering achievement in community news, in the scope of information offered, in its compelling prose and the way it grabbed the reader by the throat and wouldn’t let go.”
In the public safety category, another judge lauded Capozzi’s coverage of bicycle hazards on A1A, saying he had “excellent use of first-person accounts to focus the issue.”
The other Florida Press Club award winners this year from the The Coastal Star are:
• Rich Pollack: second place for coronavirus reporting for his article about how charities dealt with fundraising during the pandemic lockdown; and second place for public safety reporting for his article about boating safety on the Intracoastal Waterway;
• Janis Fontaine: second place for her coverage of religion news and third place for education writing, the latter for her coverage of the dispute between St. Joseph’s Episcopal School and St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church;
• Brian Biggane: second place in the “That is so … Florida” category for his article about iguanas on golf courses;
• Tim Stepien: second place in the portrait/personality photography category;
• Charles Elmore and Mary Hladky: second place in health writing for their package about a drop in overdose deaths and what local governments were doing to get money from large opioid lawsuit settlements;
• Ron Hayes: second place for light features based on a collection of his work;
• Jan Norris: third place for travel and tourism writing for her article about a tourism boom locally;
• Mary Kate Leming: third place for column writing for a collection of her Editor’s Notes;
• Scott Simmons, Jerry Lower and Tracy Allerton: third place for feature page design layout;
• The Coastal Star staff: third place for special sections, for the paper’s annual philanthropy and arts sections.
Comments