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KNKX earns top honors in regional Edward R. Murrow Awards

Edward R. Murrow Awards 2021 logo

KNKX has won several awards in the regional Edward R. Murrow Awards, including the Overall Excellence Award for large-market radio stations.

The projects that were recognized:

Excellence in Innovation: Take the Mic. This KNKX series turned the microphone (or recording app) over to youth voices in our community. Students talked about bonding with family, troubleshooting technology, keeping school spirit alive, police brutality and racism, competing (or not) in sports and more.

Podcast: Transmission. Transmission is a podcast about life at the heart of an epidemic. As the nation copes with the coronavirus pandemic, Transmission explores what it’s like in the Pacific Northwest. Over the last year, reporters have fanned out around the region to talk about school, Santa, connecting with family, losing jobs, losing loved ones and more.

News Documentary: Transmission, Episode 19: The Unpaid. This episode looked at how problems within the Employment Security Department meant hardship and, in some cases, financial ruin for unemployed and furloughed workers.

Investigative Reporting: Death Investigation in Washington. Kari Plog investigated the system of medical examiners and elected coroners in a three-part series, poring over documents and talking to people in the industry and those affected by their work.

Overall Excellence: KNKX earned the top honor in the regional Edward R. Murrow Awards in the Large Market Radio category. The station competed against news radio outlets from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Alaska. You can listen to our submission entry -- a collection of excerpts from an array of our 2020 reporting -- below.

See the complete list of winners here.

"No one could have imagined the unrelenting news cycle of 2020 and the responsibility we would face as a newsroom," KNKX news director Florangela Davila said. "We turned our basements and kitchen tables into our new workspaces and huddled under blankets so we could record. We took on reporting about science, coroners, being Black, being young, being stretched thin financially and grief.

"We produced story after story, delivered newscast after newscast after newscast, wrote web story after web story after web story," she added. "We worked extraordinarily hard as a team even though we haven’t been in each other’s company for eons."

Regional Murrow Awards are presented to small and large radio, television and digital outlets based in 14 geographic regions. Regional winners are automatically considered for a national award.

The Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA) has been honoring outstanding achievements in electronic journalism with the Edward R. Murrow Awards since 1971. Award recipients demonstrate the spirit of excellence that Murrow set as a standard for the profession of electronic journalism.

National winners, including digital news organization and student awards, will be announced in summer 2021.

The regional Murrow Awards announcement wasn't KNKX's only good news this week. Reporter Will James and his Seattle Times reporting colleagues Sydney Brownstone and Scott Greenstone are finalists for the Livingston Awards for their work on the Outsiders podcast. The finalists were chosen from more than 500 entries for work released in 2020. The Livingston Awards celebrate outstanding journalists who are under the age of 35. The winners will be announced in June.