Tampa Bay Times wins Emmy award for ‘Hidden Histories’ video series

Florida’s Best Newspaper is celebrating an Emmy win after bringing home the gold Saturday for a historical video series.

The Tampa Bay Times series “Hidden Histories” won in the Historical/Cultural - Short Form Content category at this weekend’s 45th Annual Suncoast Regional Emmy Awards. The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Suncoast Chapter covers a wide area ranging from New Orleans to San Juan, Puerto Rico.

The winning entry of two shorts, created by lead video producer Jennifer Glenfield and former Times staffer James Borchuck, focused on Tampa Bay’s erased Black cemeteries and high turnout among St. Petersburg’s Black voters.

Glenfield explained the “Hidden Histories” series sprang from the wealth of content gathered from a preservation drive at St. Petersburg’s Dr. Carter G. Woodson African American Museum organized by Times Deputy Editor of Photography Boyzell Hosey and staff photographer John Pendygraft.

“We wanted to find a way to tell the stories that community brought to us. And it turned out that we had enough of these stories beyond the event,” Glenfield said. ”We shot everything before the pandemic began and it sat on hard drives for almost a year before it was pulled from the back burners and realized.”

The series also has a third installment about how Florida’s government carefully curated the state’s image over the decades.