Bee Metro Staff
Published Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Setting It Straight: A story on Metro Page B2 Tuesday about The Bee winning an Overseas Press Club award for "The Pineros: Men of the Pines" omitted a third award winner: Web designer Seth Vanbooven. It was the Web version of the series on Latino forest workers, published in November, that won the international award and Vanbooven was a critical part of that submission along with reporter Tom Knudson and photographer Hector Amezcua. Vanbooven's work can be viewed at www.sacbee.com/pineros.
The Overseas Press Club has recognized The Bee's online coverage of abuses of Latino migrants working in the timber industry with the club's first award for Web coverage of international affairs.
The award is one of several to be announced today as part of the club's 67th annual competition to honor the finest international journalism.
Reported by writer Tom Knudson and photographer Hector Amezcua, "The Pineros: Men of the Pines" examined the lives and deaths of migrant workers employed by timber companies under contract to the U.S. Forest Service.
The stories, which first ran in November, documented workplace abuses and safety issues faced by the men who, in planting seedlings and clearing brush, represented the manual labor behind the federal Healthy Forests Initiative.
In its online version at sacbee.com (check Bee's Best: Special Reports from The Bee on the left side of the home page), the stories appear in both English and Spanish, and the package features photo galleries of Amezcua's work taken in western U.S. forests and in Guatemala.
Graphic artist Seth Van Booven designed the series' presentation on sacbee.com.
The Bee's award-winning coverage, both in the pages of the newspaper and on Sacbee.com, generated calls for reforming the way the U.S. Forest Service supervised its contracts with timber companies and led to U.S. Senate hearings.