APRN is proud to announce reporter John Ryan, from member station KTOO, has brought more national honors to Alaska’s public radio family.
The Society of Environmental Journalists gave John its second-place award for “Outstanding Beat/In-Depth Reporting, Radio” for As the Sound Churns, a documentary he produced as a freelancer for KUOW (Seattle) last fall. He finished it shortly before moving to Juneau to join KTOO.
The SEJ Awards for Reporting on the Environment are the world’s largest and most comprehensive awards for journalism on environmental topics. XM Satellite Radio’s “Bob Edwards Show” took first place for its special on mountaintop-removal coal mining in West Virginia. The Canadian Broadcast Corporation’s “Quirks and Quarks” program took third for its coverage of biofuels. The awards were announced last week at Stanford University during SEJ’s annual meeting.
Here’s what the SEJ judges had to say about “As the Sound Churns”:
Ryan’s style is loose, cool and pleasingly ragged around the edges. Listen a bit closer and one also finds solid storytelling, thorough reporting and very clever, considered use of sound. Some of these elements can be cloying in the wrong hands. In Ryan’s they all come together to create a great sense of place. It stood out amid all other entries because of its unique use of the medium. It raises the bar. You always wonder what Ryan has up his sleeve next. It broke the mold that environmental journalism usually gets squeezed into. Ryan didn’t just tell us about The Puget Sound, he took us there — even when that meant following a trail of human waste, or ending up under a capsized kayak — but not at the same time, thankfully.
The full list of SEJ winners in 10 categories is available online here.
As the Sound Churns has now received four awards:
- 2007 Public Radio News Directors Inc. (PRNDI) Awards: 1st Place, Best News Series
- 2007 SEJ Awards for Reporting on the Environment: 2nd place, Outstanding Beat/In-depth Reporting, Radio
- 2007 Radio-Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) Regional Murrow Awards — Region 1, Radio: Large Market: 1st Place, News Documentary
- Society of Professional Journalists 2007 Northwest Regional Excellence In Journalism Competition: 1st Place, News Series
You can see and hear more of John Ryan’s work at KTOO, PRX and in multiple APRN programs, including AK.
Congratulations to John Ryan, KUOW and KTOO!
