Remember when I told you about Bill Day in Memphis, the cartoonist who was laid off (by The Commercial Appeal) the same week that Robert Ariail and I were?
And remember how Robert, after being laid off, became the first American to win a major international award for his cartoons?
Well, now Bill’s added further glory to our fraternity:
>>> Washington, D.C. – The Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights has announced the winners of the 42nd Annual Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards in nine professional and two student categories. This year’s winning journalists covered diverse subjects including human trafficking, Latin America’s youngest migrants, Alzheimer’s disease, infant mortality, Navy abuses against gay sailors, Mexico’s grisly drug war, enduring poverty in Appalachia, and repression in Iran.
>>> The RFK Journalism Awards honor outstanding reporting on the issues that defined the life and work of Robert F. Kennedy: human rights, social justice, and the power of individual action in the United States and around the world. The awards go to extraordinary examples of journalism that examine the causes, conditions, and remedies of injustice. The winning entries were selected in several rounds by a panel of 60 volunteer judges, all media professionals. The RFK Journalism Committee, which is composed of seven advisors, chose the grand prize winner from the first-place contenders in each category.
>>> The RFK Journalism Awards were established after Robert F. Kennedy’s death by journalists who covered his history-making presidential campaign in 1968.
>>> The Journalism Awards will be presented by Ethel Kennedy and Committee Chair Margaret Engel at a ceremony on Wednesday, May 26, 2010 at 6:00 PM at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
>>> “The exceptional news stories found in the hundreds of entries to the RFK Journalism Awards underscores the need for resources to keep serious journalism alive,” said Engel. “Most of the situations exposed in the entries would never have come to light without individual journalists and newsrooms taking the time and effort to dig deeply into these difficult and important subjects.”
>>>
>>> Cartoon Winner: Series of cartoons, Bill Day, United Feature Syndicate: Cartoonist Bill Day sheds light on the continuing problem of infant mortality in America, especially among minority populations. His unusual special project creates clear and easily-readable cartoons, raising public awareness, partly through a grassroots movement that led to legislation and policy improvements.
That’s awesome. And very well-deserved.
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Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone…
Oh, they knew. The bean-counters of the industry knew.
I don’t think they realized these guys would keep winning awards, though.
Not that they wouldn’t have laid them off anyway had they known that.
Isn’t the concept of “bean counter” antithetical to the concept of “award-winner”? I mean, bean counters look to the bottom line, and if they can get a bigger number there by cutting and pasting wire service stories about “spring coats” and other irrelevances to our life here, why even delve into the question of quality?
Why, indeed.