Best web coverage of international affairs
AWARD YEAR: 2005
AWARD NAME: Website Award 2005
RECIPIENTS: Tom Knudson, Hector Amezcua, and Seth Vanbooven
AFFILIATION: The Sacramento Bee
HONORED WORK: “The Pineros: Men of the Pines”
This series of stories, told using a rich mix of audio, video, animated graphics, original documentation, and careful, well-written prose, focused on the abuse of Latin American migrants working stands of timber in the forests of California. While the story takes place in California, The Sacramento Bee rightly presents it as a larger tale of open borders, immigration, and deregulation in the age of globalization.
Reporter Tom Knudson and photojournalist Hector Amezcua take their audience to an insular world as foreign to average Americans as any on the planet, a world “which only happens to be in America,” as one judge put it. Their work steers clear of the hyperbole and production slickness that taints too much of today’s journalism.
Their work carefully parses the elements of this heart-wrenching story into sidebars, backgrounders, and multimedia features, pairing each element to the medium best suited to present it. The piece also provides readers with a way to contact the companies and government agencies involved and includes a “Respond to this Series” link that led to a genuine debate over the value of their journalism.
Citation for Excellence:
Naka Nathaniel and Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times
“International Multimedia Reporting”