Reporter Klao Bell (left) yesterday received her Jamaica Broilers Fair Play trophy from R. Danny Williams, chairman of the Jamaica Broilers Group. - Junior Dowie/Staff Photographer
TWO GLEANER reporters yesterday won awards in the 2001/2002 Jamaica Broilers Fair Play Competition at the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel where the 2002 Excellence in Media Lecture was held.
Klao Bell walked away with the Jamaica Broilers Fair Play Trophy in print, for her series of stories, "Lost In the Justice System - The Ivan Barrows Story". The stories appeared in The Sunday Gleaner in April this year.
Miss Bell also received a $50,000 cash award.
"This is a wonderful honour which could not have been possible without the support and direction of my editors," she said. "The Jamaica Broilers Group is to be commended for this initiative."
Like her, reporter Patricia Watson received the Fair Play Certificate of Merit for placing second for her story: "Breaking The Silence: Dispelling Myths About HIV/AIDS". The story appeared in the Outlook Magazine earlier this year. Ms. Watson is to receive a $10,000 cheque.
The main purpose of the Fair Play awards is to encourage journalists to be thorough and balanced in investigating and reporting on important national issues.
Others honoured yesterday were POWER 106's Nationwide news team for its "Corruption at The NHDC... and The Angus Report" series. In April this year, the Nationwide team broke the news on the findings of the Angus Commission into irregularities at National Housing Development Corporation (NHDC). The report led to the resignation of Water and Housing Minister Dr. Karl Blythe.
Yesterday, Nationwide's News Editor Arthur Hall noted that the news team's continuous hard work had paid off. "We are pleased we were appreciated by the judges who were senior members of the profession," he said.
Meanwhile, Television Jamaica's (TVJ) Carol Francis also won the Fair Play Certificate of Merit in the electronic media for placing third with her entry: "A Child's Perspective On HIV/AIDS". She also received $5,000 cash.
The annual Excellence In Media Forum seeks to enhance the on-going development of journalists across the media landscape by providing opportunities for practitioners to discuss, with their peers, responses to global developments that are impacting the way the media operate.
Keynote speakers at each year's lecture is a noted journalist from the print or electronic media in the Caribbean, North America or the United Kingdom.
Yesterday's guest speaker was Leon Dash, Professor of Journalism and African-American studies at the University of Illinois. Professor Dash is a pioneer in immersion journalism - the method which allows a reporter to live among story subjects and gather the story over a period of years.
Using his series "When Children Want Children," as a case study, the professor told journalist and media practitioners that his desire to do the study in 1984 was to help the black race in his community which he thought was at a disadvantage because of high rate of pregnancies among teenagers and young adult women.
Returning from Angola in 1984, where he had spent five years doing research on the guerrilla movement in that country, Professor Dash said a friend told him that 53 per cent of black American children were born to single parents in 1983, and that more than one-third of these single mothers were adolescent girls growing up in urban poverty.
His interest being aroused, Professor Dash said he then contacted the National Institute of Health in Washington where he was told that the figures were indeed true and were growing.
He said he focused his study on the Washington Highlands which had the highest number of adolescent child births, and where 26 per cent of its 19,000 residents lived below the Federal subsistence standards.
"One of the things that concerned me was that I knew that if adolescent girls at young ages growing up in poverty, were having children at such early ages, that meant their children would be adversely affected and have little chances of climbing out of poverty themselves, and that it would become an inter-generational phenomenon," Professor Dash said.
According to him, he spent 17 months interviewing six families, with some of these family members lying in their responses to questions. He said he also used between eight and 16 hours recording interviews, and ended up doing 67 two-hour interviews.
Professor Dash who told the audience that he lived in a roach-infested apartment while conducting his study, said none of the black women he interviewed said their pregnancies were intentional to enhance their self-esteem. Both mother and father felt once they had a child they were immediately became adults, he said.
But the stark reality to this thinking, the professor said, was that 50 per cent of these mothers between 13 and 17 years had a second child within two years of having their first child.
For his "Rosa Lee" story - a four-year study of an underclass family - Professor Dash won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995, and in March 1999, New York University's Journalism Department selected the story as one of the best 100 works in 20th century American journalism.
