The Chicago Tribune has won a national award for its coverage of the blizzard that battered Chicago in February 2011.
The Society of Professional Journalists, announcing its Sigma Delta Chi awards Tuesday, gave the deadline reporting prize to the Tribune’s staff for its work on the blizzard, the third-largest snowstorm in the city’s history.
Awards in dozens of categories were chosen from 1,700 entries from around the United States, according to the group, a national organization for journalists.
The Tribune’s reporting —
spjvideo.org/sdx/sdx11/deadline-reporting-101.pdf
— was led by coverage of the decision by city officials to try to keep Lake Shore Drive open, resulting in hundreds of drivers being stranded.
The Feb. 3, 2011, paper was topped by a now-iconic photograph of a long line of cars and buses caught in deep snowdrifts on the northbound drive. It was taken from the North Avenue pedestrian bridge over the drive.
Angela Caputo and Kimbriell Kelly, of the Chicago Reporter, a local investigative news magazine, won a Sigma Delta Chi award for public service in magazine journalism for their October-November 2011 articles, Out at First, on the Chicago Housing Authority’s one-strike eviction policy.
