ALBANY — Adding up top honors in categories ranging from investigative and political reporting to best podcast, feature photo and newsletter, the Times Union was named “Newspaper of the Year” in the New York Press Association’s 2022 Better Newspaper Contest.
The award is given to the publication that receives the most points from first-, second- and third-place awards in the overall contest. For the first time, there was a tie for the honor: The Times Union was named alongside the Highlands Current, a weekly publication in Cold Spring. The results of the annual competition were announced Friday and Saturday during the association’s annual meeting in Albany.
The Times Union’s other major prize in this year’s contest, the Stuart C. Dorman Award for Editorial Excellence, reflected “an impressive 210 points in the editorial competition, beating out its nearest competitor by 25 points,” the judges said in their remarks.
Emilie Munson, Matt Rocheleau and Ying Zhao won the top Freedom of Information Award as well as first place for Best Investigative/In-Depth Reporting for their work on the paper’s series on “restraint and seclusion” practices in New York’s educational institutions — part of Hearst Newspapers’ national investigative look at the controversial techniques.
Judges selecting the Freedom of Information Award called the series “a joint effort that … exposed the issue of student restraints, control and other methods of detainment as well as the total lack of, or discombobulated patchwork of, statistical reporting by school districts, police departments and state and federal agencies in regard to something critically important: the welfare, health and well-being of children in schools.”
Comments on the Investigative/In-Depth Reporting award called the series “deeply reported and authoritative with lots of human stories. … This type of story…
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