Investigative series win statewide awards
The Houston Chronicle’s series on special education and safety hazards at chemical plants both won big Sunday at the Associated Press Managing Editors’ awards.
The seven-part “Denied” series on special education quotas won the first-place awards for community service, freedom of information, online package of the year and star investigative report of the year.
The “Chemical Breakdown” series on uncovering Houston’s hidden world of toxic releases won first place in the “Team Effort” category. The reporters involved are Mark Collette, Matt Dempsey, Susan Carroll.
Brian Rosenthal led the reporting on the “Denied” series, which included contribtions from Carroll and St. John Barned-Smith.
The series showed how thousands of disabled children in Texas were denied specialized instruction guaranteed by federal law, exposing a long-standing but previously unreported Texas policy setting a quota on special education services at no more than 8.5 percent of students in any of the state’s 1,200 school districts.
Lisa Falkenberg, a previous Pulitzer Prize winner, won first place in the “star opinion writer of the year” category. Michael Ciaglo was awarded third place as the “star photojournalist of the year.” And Susan Barber won second place as the “star designer of the year.”
The Chronicle also won several APME awards on Saturday, including about a dozen first-place honors for written, digital and photojournalism.
Lisa Gray won first place for best blog for her work on HoustonChronicle. com’s Gray Matters page.
Lauren Caruba, now at the San Antonio ExpressNews, won first place for feature series. Business reporter Jenny Deam won second place in the category. Deam also was awarded first place for specialty reporting.
Sports writer Brian T. Smith won first place for sports column, while Jenny Dial Creech won second.
Reporters David Barron and Benjamin Wermund won first place in sports breaking news reporting. Barron also won third place in that category.
Falkenberg won first in
general column writing. Joe Holley won first in editorial writing.
Photojournalist Marie D. De Jesus won second and third place for short videos.
Andrea Zelinski and Martin Kuz won second place for deadline writing. Dane Schiller won third place in that category.
Monica Rhor won second place in feature writing. Science writer Kim McGuire won second in short features.
Features writer WeiHuan Chen was awarded second for comment and criticism.
Katherine Blunt, a Hearst fellow now with the Chronicle, won first place in business reporting for
work she did at the San Antonio Express-News. Deam won second place in that category and Jordan Blum was awarded third.
Mark Mulligan won first place in spot news photography.
Photographers Brett Coomer, Ciaglo, Steve Gonzales, Mulligan, Melissa Phillip, Karen Warren and Elizabeth Conley took home first place for photojournalism.
Suzanne Garofalo and Steve Schaeffer won second and third for headlines, respectively. Bill Montgomery won honorable mention. Nadya Shakoor won first place for feature page design. Robert Wuensche won honorable mention.