Times staff
The Tampa Bay Times has won four first place medallions in the National Headliner Awards, one of the oldest and largest such contests in the country, with top honors in journalistic innovation for the special investigation "Why Cops Shoot."
Award winning project: Why Cops Shoot
The Times' review of Florida police shootings combined a broad sweep of records with the stories of individual shootings to reveal how law and order can devolve so quickly into disaster. The project, which included a first of its kind searchable database of six years of police shootings in Florida, delved into the ways fear and bias stoke confusion, revealed that blacks are shot at a higher rate than whites and examined ways to stem the violence.
"Why Cops Shoot", by former staff writer Ben Montgomery, Times computer-assisted reporting specialist Connie Humburg and reporter/developer Neil Bedi, was also a finalist for the American Society of News Editors' Punch Sulzberger Award for Online Storytelling, which honors "excellence and innovation in the use of digital tools to tell news stories." And it was a finalist in the multimedia category of the prestigious Scripps Howard journalism awards.
Also winning first place honors for the Times in the Headliner Awards were John Romano for his local interest column and photographer Douglas Clifford for "Immersed in Surreal Setting," in the pictorial category.
Former staff photographer Loren Elliott won first place for "Claw Back," an entry in newspaper sports action photography.
The Headliner Awards were founded in 1934 by the Press Club of Atlantic City, and in the years since, more than 2,000 awards have been presented in writing, photography, newspapers, magazines, radio and more.
This year, the Times also picked up Headliner Awards in:
• Feature writing on a variety of subjects by an individual, second place, Leonora LaPeter Anton
• Spot news photography, third place, for "Hot Wheels," the Times' series on the epidemic of juvenile auto theft in Pinellas County, Luis Santana
• Feature photography, second place, for "Eclipse!", Dirk Shadd
• Feature photography, third place, for "Getting out of the Storm," Douglas Clifford
• Sports features photography, third place, "To Lightning, With Love," Dirk Shadd
• Pictorial, "The Land of the Free," third place, Scott Keeler
• Online video up to three minutes, third place, "Hot Wheels," Dirk Shadd and Monica Herndon