Article published April 14, 2004
Blade writers earn journalist group's investigative honors
Three Blade reporters have won a 2003 Sigma Delta Chi award for investigative reporting, the Society of Professional Journalists announced yesterday.
Michael D. Sallah, Mitch Weiss, and Joe Mahr received the award for their series, "Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths," which exposed atrocities committed by an elite U.S. Army unit in Vietnam - and how commanders failed to stop the atrocities and the Army failed to prosecute the soldiers involved.
That trio of reporters won journalism's highest honor, the Pulitzer Prize, April 5.
The Sigma Delta Chi Award for investigative reporting was in the category of newspapers with circulations of 100,000 or greater.
Entries are judged by journalists from across the country, each of whom has a reputation for journalistic excellence, SPJ said.
In commenting on The Blade series, the judges wrote that the series "is far and away the best piece of journalism this year and for many years before it."Judges said that it was valiant for a paper of The Blade's size to devote the resources it did to this story.
"Equally amazing: How smooth and well-written it was," judges wrote.
"Basically, we selected this series because it did what important journalism can do - rewrite history."
The Society of Professional Journalists, based in Indianapolis, was founded in 1909 as Sigma Delta Chi and works to encourage the free practice of journalism and stimulate high standards of ethical behavior.
The society's awards will be presented July 9 at a dinner at the National Press Club in Washington.
In addition to the Sigma Delta Chi award, The Blade reporters have won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, the Investigative Reporters and Editors medal - the top prize from that group - and the Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Newspapers, awarded by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University.
The reporters were finalists in the Scripps Howard Foundation National Journalism Awards, the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting, and the National Headliner Awards.
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