State Impact Pennsylvania wins Alfred I DuPont-Columbia University Award

State Impact Pennsylvania, a joint reporting initiative on the Marcellus Shale, has won one of broadcast journalism’s most prestigious awards. WHYY’s Susan Phillips is a key member of the winning team.

The Alfred I DuPont-Columbia University Awards announced today that State Impact Pennsylvania is one of its 13 winners for 2013. Others include CBS News, USA Today, NPR and PBS.

State Impact Pennsylvania, which launched in July 2011, is a partnership among WHYY, WITF in Harrisburg and NPR to bring consistent, in-depth reporting to coverage of energy and environment across the commonwealth. The early focus has been on the natural gas boom in the Marcellus Shale region.

The award citation reads in part: “This joint reporting project . . . showed the significant impact of natural gas fracking on Pennsylvania residents, and is an important model for reporting on local issues.”

WHYY’s Phillips works with Scott Detrow of WITF to post updates, reports and analysis multiple times a day on the State Impact Pennsylvania site. The two journalists also produce in-depth radio reports for public radio stations across Pennsylvania, as well as for national broadcast on NPR.

You can see them talking about their reporting in the accompanying video.

You can see and hear the award-winning stories by following the accompanying links.

State Impact Pennsylvania is one of eight team-reporting initiatives that NPR and NPR.org launched in 2011, in hopes of improving the depth of reporting on state issues and having some of that journalism bubble up to national broadcasts.

An NPR team in Washington, D.C., coordinates all eight projects, producing multimedia for the Web site.  Other WHYY journalists have contributed reporting, videos, photos and graphics to the project.

Phillips joined WHYY in 2004.  A Philadelphia native, she is a graduate of George Washington University with a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. She’s won numerous awards for her journalism, for stories including her series on the Marcellus Shale prior to the launch of State Impact and her reporting from the scene of the Haiti earthquake.

Before the State Impact initiative, Detrow was Pennsylvania Public Radio’s State Capitol Bureau Chief from 2009 to 2011.  A graduate of Fordham University, he won a national Edward R. Murrow Award for covering a Pennsylvania National Guard brigade’s deployment to Iraq.