The South Florida Sun Sentinel’s work on the Parkland school shooting won the national Scripps Howard Award Tuesday for breaking news coverage.
The paper had been a finalist in three categories, tying The New York Times for the number of entries making the finals.
“Breaking news coverage is not often an area where demonstrable impact can be shown, but the Sun Sentinel’s dogged real-time pursuit of every angle of the breaking story and underlying contributors to this tragedy has had a lasting impact on Parkland, on journalism and on the national conversation about guns in America,” the Scripps Howard judges concluded.
The entry featured the paper’s initial hours of coverage, a column by Mike Mayo, articles on the Broward School District’s lax disciplinary system and public relations strategies, the Voices of Change series on the aftermath of the tragedy, and Unprepared and Overwhelmed, an investigative timeline of the failures that cost children their lives.
The Scripps Howard judges honored the Sun Sentinel’s interactive work on Parkland as a finalist in two other categories, Innovation and Multimedia. Those interactive projects — Voices and Unprepared — have also been recognized by the Society for News Design, which awarded them bronze medals in the Best of Digital Design competition for journalism produced worldwide in 2018.
