“Who should do that story?”
“Breen would be great for it.”
That has become a cliched exchange on calls among sports editors when discussing a story idea that falls beyond the bounds of daily coverage. It doesn’t matter if it’s boxing, college sports, looking back on an iconic moment in Philly sports history, or the WWE, Matt Breen can drop in and tell a great story.
Continue reading Matt BreenErin McCarthy is a gifted reporter and writer who moves effortlessly from breaking news to quirky features to richly detailed profiles. She has a knack for finding stories that people want to read. She’s versatile. She’s agile. And she’s fast.
Continue reading Erin McCarthy
Erica Palan is the kind of editor who works even when she isn’t intending to.
While scrolling on Facebook one day, Erica spotted a post from a Philadelphia woman who wrote about her experience trying to help friends who had been suddenly detained by immigration agents.
That serendipitous event turned into the third-most-viewed piece on Inquirer.com so far this year.
With her feel and instinct for content that our audience wants to read, Erica reached out and asked the woman if we could run the piece. She then undertook the painstaking due diligence to elevate a Facebook post to an op-ed.
She fact-checked. She cut. A lot. She removed every unverified statement and made sure the result read seamlessly.
The op-ed was posted on July 18. It gained almost 500,000 views and had an engagement time of four minutes and nineteen seconds.
It was a success in every way. Erica had worked her magic – again – both as an editor and a social media pro.
Two years ago, Mensah M. Dean knocked on a front door on Locust Street in West Philly.
Police armed with a warrant had just raided the house in search of a fugitive wanted for the random fatal shooting of a man in Havertown and a shooting spree in Overbrook Park.
Mensah didn’t find the suspect, but when he asked the rattled woman who came to the door whether the man had been living there, she responded memorably: “Hell to the no!”
Sometimes, it takes time for the impact of a story to become clear. Tricia Nadolny’s July 22 story on deadly furniture tip-overs was a textbook example. Five months after her thoroughly reported and moving story on an alarming increase in tragic incidents, federal safety regulators and IKEA, one of the companies cited in her story, announced the recall of millions of dressers.
Their joint press release cited their justification for the recall as two toddler fatalities, including the 2014 death of a West Chester boy that first drew Tricia’s interest and ultimately became a central narrative in her February piece.
For their months of thorough and compelling coverage of the Penn State and Catholic child sex-abuse scandals and the trial verdicts that followed — on the same day — Jeremy Roebuck and John Martin are co-winners of this month’s Vigoda Award.
As one nominator said: “I was so proud to be part of the newsroom with these guys as lead reporters on two giant stories.”
Another wrote: “They gave us a sense of what was important that was going on each day,” as well as being gracious and collegial.”
“They both personified The Inquirer’s high standards.”
I am pleased to announce that the winner of the July Ralph Vigoda Award of Excellence is Larry Kesterson. Larry has been taking pictures for The Inquirer since the late 1980s. In that time, he has outlasted colleagues, supervisors, and any number of Neighbors sections. But Larry is anything but an old-timer stuck in his ways. He has long been on the vanguard of online visual journalism, and those efforts are why he is our Vigoda Award winner for July.
For a photojournalist, some things never change: You have to get to the scene fast, size things up quickly, and figure out the most effective way to tell the story. But that bare-bones outline belies the challenges in the Internet era – challenges Larry has embraced. He still races to house fires and crime scenes, but he’s ready with both his camera equipment and what one admirer calls “a great deal of journalistic curiosity.”
After one of the more notorious crimes in recent years – the July Fourth weekend slayings in Montgomery County – Larry went to the house of Gary Krobath, who had sheltered wanted man Mark Geisenheyner until he could manage to call police. Larry put together a compelling video interview for the Web that, in a nominator’s words, “took us directly into the path of a murderer.”
There is court coverage. And then there is court coverage by Inquirer reporter Joe Slobodzian. Since early June, Joe has provided Inquirer readers with compelling stories from the trial of Howard Cain and Eric Floyd, the two men charged with killing Officer Stephen Liczbinski. One nominator wrote this: “Joe has sat in the courtroom day in and out reporting on the outbursts of Floyd, who punched his attorney, of jurors weeping at the testimony of the residents of Almond Street, who rushed to save a dying Liczbinksi, of the words of Eric Floyd’s mother, who brought new meaning to the term dysfunctional family.”
Another praised Joe for his “hard-nosed, even-keeled, head-down approach to culling stories from the trenches of the city’s criminal justice system…His work never calls attention to itself; it calls attention to his subjects, and he does it with muscular, clear prose in a venue where it’s so easy to canter over the top.”
One of his most poignant pieces began: “At the end, Philadelphia Police Sgt. Stephen Liczbinski had barely enough time to slide from behind the wheel of his patrol car and begin to stand.
In his nearly three years of covering City Hall, Patrick Kerkstra has distinguished himself as one of the finest governmental beat reporters at the newspaper.
He’s taken aim at the Philadelphia Parking Authority, the Board of Revision of Taxes and, most recently, deadbeat city workers who are failing to pay their taxes despite the city’s own budget crisis.
For his dogged, in-depth reports – the hallmark of an outstanding beat reporter — and his stellar writing, Patrick is the Vigoda winner for the month of July.
Patrick, acting on a tip and with the help of Dylan Purcell, exposed the city’s laxity in collecting taxes from its own workers. About 2,000 workers and their spouses were delinquent on their real estate bills, including about 1,000 who were more than two years behind, the analysis found.
He continued to press the issue and showed that the administration had not been as proactive on the issue as Mayor Nutter pledged.
They say if you want to get a job done, ask a busy man. Perhaps that is why so many of us seek out John Brumfield for help.
Amid all the chores John has undertaken in support of the newsroom, this summer he cheerfully took on a new role as a one-man Welcome Wagon for the interns and the three international fellows. For his multitasking prowess, John is being recognized as this summer’s winner of the Ralph Vigoda award for July
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For many in the newsroom, the invisible tasks performed by the editorial assistants have become a little harder to ignore as those jobs increasingly fall on the journalists to do themselves. On the National/Foreign Desk, where John worked until last year, his diplomatic skill handling unhappy phone callers is sorely missed. Even though he moved across the room last year to serve the paper’s editors, John still takes on some of the clerical details on the National/Foreign Desk – partly out of habit, partly out of kindness.
It might be that John’s droll humor and sophisticated repartee are an act – after all, he has more movie credits than the rest of the newsroom combined (who can forget his work alongside Matthew Modine and Nicolas Cage in 1984’s “Birdy”). Continue reading John Brumfield
The Vigoda Award 