Best Newspaper Writing 2001 celebrates the winners of the ASNE Distinguished Writing Awards, including the Jesse Laventhol Prizes created to honor deadline reporting, and featuring the Community Service Photojournalism Award on a companion CD-ROM.

For almost 25 years, Poynter has published the Best Newspaper Writing series, books that have inspired and influenced reporters, editors, teachers, and students. Journalists and educators have welcomed this series as an important tool for learning and strengthening the crafts of reporting and writing.

Contents: Tom Hallman’s series in The Oregonian is the story of the remarkable boy behind a grotesque deformity that distorts his face and head. Hallman goes behind the mask to reveal Sam’s profoundly normal self, his family’s love, the passionate care of doctors, the miracles and limits of medicine, and the small cruelties of strangers that define true ugliness.

Steven Erlanger of The New York Times knew enough about the shifting politics of Yugoslavia that he recognized the first signs of Slobodan Milosevic’s demise. His insight-rich deadline reporting is wrapped in a package of learned context and punctuated by quotes that ground the stories solidly in a Serbian mine or the streets of Belgrade.

The staff of The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., sent almost two dozen reporters to cover a Seton Hall dormitory fire. The team produced highly focused, meaningful stories that combine an emphasis on teamwork, great attention to detail, and a clear appreciation for what the loss meant to its community.

Leonard Pitts’s columns for The Miami Herald cover the broad landscape of the human experience. His winning columns take current events, wrestle them into a historical context, then turn them just so to surprise the reader and shine a new, insightful light on the matter.

Stephen Henderson of The Baltimore Sun employs the conversational tone of the columnist, the curiosity of the beat reporter, and the narrative arc of creative non-fiction to give his editorials a distinct signature. There’s no question where his editorials stand or, for that matter, who wrote them. Stephen Magagnini of The Sacramento Bee tells the story of the stranglehold crime, cultural alienation, and a widening generation gap have had on the dislocated Hmong people. Magagnini lays out values, habits, and hopes that make Hmong culture distinct, while telling a universal story of the battle between assimilation and cultural survival.

The new Community Service Photojournalism Award honors photographic reporting that offers compelling visual content and has had such an impact on the community that changes came about as a result. In “Communities of Faith,” John Beale of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette made almost 80 visits to the places where people put their spirituality into action. He was able to take readers, his newspaper, even the people he photographed to places in the Pittsburgh area some never knew existed.

Best Newspaper Writing 2001 includes interviews with the winners about their craft by editor Keith Woods, and Roy Peter Clark, Aly Colón, Karen Dunlap, Kenny Irby, and Christopher Scanlan of The Poynter Institute faculty; the work of 10 other writers and two photojournalists who share the lessons they learned; study questions useful to students, teachers, and working journalists; a bibliography; and an interactive CD-ROM.

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