News, Mundo honored for immigration series

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Deseret Morning News and Salt Lake City's Mundo Hispano were honored here Friday night for a seven-part series exploring the effects of illegal immigration on Utah and the United States.

The Society of Professional Journalists, the nation's most broad-based journalism organization, presented second place in its New America Award competition to the Utah newspapers.

"Life in the Shadows/Viviendo en la Sombra" was published in the Morning News last October and was also made available in Spanish through Mundo Hispano, a Spanish-language newspaper.

A comprehensive look at how illegal immigration affects people's lives and attitudes on both sides of the border, the series examined illegal immigration in relation to schools, health care, the legal system, immigrant families, anti-immigration groups and politics.

Deseret Morning News reporters Dennis Romboy, Lucinda Dillon Kinkead, Deborah Bulkeley, Lee Davidson and Jesse Hyde were at the core of the project, along with the paper's photographers, graphic designers and editors.

To make the series more available in Spanish as well as English, the Morning News worked with Gladys Gonzalez and Sandra Plazas, who publish and edit Mundo Hispano, a local bilingual newspaper published in Midvale.

Angelyn N. Hutchinson, Morning News assistant managing editor and project editor, accepted the award for the newspapers at the Sigma Delta Chi banquet at the National Press Club.

First place went to WNYC Radio, The Center for New York City Affairs at The New School in association with Minnesota Public Radio and Macollvie Jean-Francois, Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska and Arun Venugopal for "Feet in Two Worlds: Immigrants in a Global City." The broadcast, narrated by author Frank McCourt, told the stories of new immigrants from various nations and their adaptation to life in New York City.

In the newspaper and radio projects, teamwork by ethnic and mainstream journalists enriched the reporting and made it more impacting than it might have been otherwise, said Guy Baehr, chairman of SPJ's awards and honors committee.

"We're extremely gratified to be able to recognize these journalistic pioneers and, we hope, to encourage others in the future to give their audiences the kind of journalism that can result from such innovative collaborations," Baehr said.