FSNE Awards reflect progress we’re making

After three years as president and publisher of FLORIDA TODAY, I was privileged to be appointed regional president overseeing Gannett’s Florida Group. In addition to FLORIDA TODAY, the Florida Region includes the Tallahassee Democrat, The News-Press in Fort Myers and the Pensacola News Journal.

The regional president doesn’t get involved in the day-to-day running of the other three media companies. Each site has their own capable leaders. Skip Foster became the Tallahassee Democrat publisher in January and is off to great start. Lisa Reese will take over the reins in Pensacola as publisher, coming to Gannett from a news leadership role in western Pennsylvania. And in the not too distant future, we will appoint a new publisher in Fort Myers to replace Mei-Mei Chan, who retired from publisher and Florida regional president.

We already collaborate a lot and we will do more in the future. The recent announcement of one single Gannett national news organization will foster closer working relationships between all Gannett news organizations, including the USA TODAY news team. Unlike almost all other news organizations, we have the bandwidth to be a national to local media organization.

The coordination will accelerate. A very recent example is an investigative series that starts national and dovetails into a local investigative story is the handling of rape kits across the United States. This is a national story that warrants local follow-up in the 92 Gannett markets.

This week, for the first time I attended the Florida Society of News Editors annual conference in Lake Mary as regional president. Winners of FSNE prestigious annual journalism awards were recognized. For purposes of this contest, news organizations are grouped by size of readership. FLORIDA TODAY and Fort Myers are grouped in the second category and Pensacola and Tallahassee are in the third category.

I had that proud parent feeling as Gannett’s Florida Group racked up 34 awards (13 first place) in the annual journalism contest plus the Gold Medal for Public Service (Pensacola) and the Waldo Proffit Award for Excellence in Environmental Journalism (FLORIDA TODAY). The Pensacola News Journal led the way with 16 awards (8 first place) followed by FLORIDA TODAY with 8, The News-Press with 6 and the Tallahassee Democrat with 5.

The Gold Medal for Public Service went to the Pensacola News Journal for the coverage of a jail explosion by Kevin Robinson and T.S. Strickland. This coverage expanded beyond breaking news and uncovered the fact that workers had complained for 24 hours about the smell of gas.

The Waldo Proffit Award was handed out by the University of South Florida School of Mass Communications to FLORIDA TODAY’s Jim Waymer for his coverage of the Indian River Lagoon. The lagoon focus is an example of where we’d like our coverage to connect with and inspire readers into action.

The Tallahassee Democrat won second place in the Breaking News category for the staff’s tremendous efforts during the Strozier Library shooting in November. Senior writer Gerald Ensley won a second place in Commentary and photographer Joe Rondone picked up a second and a third place award in Feature Photos and Sports Photography. The Democrat also won first place in Sports Page Design.

While we don’t let the awards define our existence, it is nice to get an independent assessment of our work.

As we progress, we are committed to our priorities of strengthening our community leadership, watchdog journalism and storytelling both in print and on digital platforms.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned.