John Hughes, editor of the Deseret Morning News, and Nancy Conway, editor of the Salt Lake Tribune, have been selected to receive a national Sunshine Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Sunshine Awards are given by the SPJ to recognize contributions in the area of open government. Hughes and Conway are being honored for forming the Utah Media Coalition, which fought bills in the Utah Legislature designed to limit access to government records and make accessing those records more expensive and difficult. The efforts of the Utah Media Coalition helped to defeat all of those bills.

Also being recognized by the SPJ is Ryan Nees, a high school student from Kokomo, Ind.

The Sunshine Awards will be presented Aug. 26 at the SPJ Convention & National Journalism Conference in Chicago.