Bee Metro Staff
Published Tuesday, March 14, 2006
The Sacramento Bee is one of 17 news organizations honored for reporting on race and ethnicity in the eighth annual Columbia Graduate School of Journalism's "Let's Do It Better!" competition.
The Bee won the best practices award for "The Pineros: Men of the Pines," an investigation by reporter Tom Knudson and photographer Hector Amezcua into the mistreatment and abuse of Latino forest workers.
The series, a news release stated, was recognized for documenting the long-standing "lack of training, safety abuses, injuries and deaths that led to a vow of reform from the U.S. Forest Service."
Award winners are brought together at a June workshop to discuss ways to improve the diversity of coverage and newsrooms.
"The excellence awards recognized a variety of best practices, ranging from major investigations to the search for racial identity," Arlene Morgan, director of the program, said in the release. In all, 100 organizations - most of them newspapers - were considered for the awards.