Denver Post journalists won five first-place awards in the annual Best of the West competition, the most of any paper in the 13 Western states from Alaska and Hawaii through the Rocky Mountain West.
The paper also won four second-place awards in the contest for work published in print or online in 2007.
The initial coverage by staff writer Miles Moffeit of the case against Tim Masters won first prize for general reporting. Of the work, “Sketchy Evidence,” judge Bruce Andriatch, suburban editor of The Buffalo News, said: “He did what we would all like to do: He found a good story, and he told it exceptionally well. By my estimation, he did it better than anyone else in this contest.”
In project reporting, Post staff writer David Olinger won first place for “Dying to Testify,” a series exposing the lack of funding in Colorado for witness protection.
“This is a project which potentially affects every citizen who has the misfortune of witnessing a crime,” wrote judge Bill Dalton, projects and enterprise editor at The Kansas City Star.
Post photographers won both first and second place in the feature photography category, with RJ Sangosti taking first for his photo “Lightning.” Cyrus McCrimmon took second for his photo “Shave,” of a woman getting her head shaved to support breast-cancer awareness.
Other first-place awards went to editorial cartoonist Mike Keefe in that category and the online, photography and reporting staff in the multimedia storytelling category for the presentation of the series “Trashing the Truth” on the destruction of DNA evidence in criminal cases.
Other second-place winners from the Post were Meghan Lyden, Helen Richardson, Mike McPhee and other staffers for video storytelling with “Sketchy Evidence;” Michael Riley for explanatory reporting in “Lawless Lands” on the lack of prosecutions in Indian Country; and the paper’s staff for spot-news reporting in the coverage of December’s church shootings in Arvada and Colorado Springs.
The Rocky Mountain News won two third-place awards, and The Gazette of Colorado Springs won a second and a third in the contest, which was administered by First Amendment Funding Inc., an Arizona nonprofit dedicated to helping newspapers battle for public access to government records and meetings.
