Miami Herald’s ‘Covid Cruises’ series wins top honor in Florida journalism contest
The Miami Herald’s “Covid Cruises” series was recognized Saturday night with the top honor, the public service award, at the Florida Press Club’s Excellence in Journalism awards.
The public service award is named after Frances DeVore, who was an acclaimed journalist for the Ocala Star-Banner.
The series looked at the devastating toll of COVID-19 on Florida’s cruise industry. Through various methods including crowdsourcing, it comprehensively tracked, with monthly updates, infections and deaths in passengers and crew members around the world. The project included a public database, which has been consulted by researchers nationwide, and a full methodology.
The stories were written by Taylor Dolven, Nicholas Nehamas, Alex Harris and Sarah Blaskey, who led the data analysis. Blaskey designed an algorithm capable of accurately tracking infections and deaths without double-counting cases that may have been reported by more than one public health entity or news outlet. Forrest Milburn
managed the social media, including a callout for readers and crewmembers to tell the Herald their stories. The award comes with a $1,000 prize.
The judges wrote of the series: “Your reporting and data compilation is a public service to not just Floridians but to the nation’s travelers. You found strong characters to focus on, you wove their tales with numbers you compiled and you kept the entire project transparent, even sharing your methodology and your database. You even acknowledged to your readers that the numbers likely represent an undercount due to the lack of transparency by cruise lines.”
Covid Cruises also won in the COVID writing category, large news outlets.
The South Florida Sun
Sentinel won the other top honor, the Lucy Morgan Award for In-Depth Reporting, for “Teenage Time Bombs: A Generation in Danger.” That series examined how emotionally disturbed Florida students are able to gain access to guns. The Herald’s coverage of misconduct in the Hialeah Police Department, by Tess Riski, Jay Weaver and Nicholas Nehamas, was the runner-up in that category.
Miami Herald intern Romy Ellenbogen and Jack Brook were finalists in the “That’s So...Florida” category for their story on a Florida prison inmate who shot dozens of hours of video, portraying life behind bars in all its squalor, and smuggled it out to journalists. Prison staff knew nothing of his efforts.