2 Seattle Times reporters receive 2003 Broun award

Two Seattle Times reporters won the 2003 Heywood Broun Award for their investigative series, "Coaches who prey."

Christine Willmsen and Maureen O'Hagan were honored for the four-part series, published Dec. 14-17, which explored the largely unreported trend of male coaches preying on female athletes and the coaches' success in escaping accountability.

The Broun award, named after the famed newspaper columnist and Newspaper Guild founder, is one of journalism's top honors. The award, created in 1941, is administered by the newspaper union. The award recognizes "individual journalistic achievement by members of the working media, particularly if it helps right a wrong or correct an injustice."

The judges cited the reporters for "overcoming significant reporting barriers to gain access to school records and get teenage accounts on the record." The reporters "documented how it is not uncommon for coaches who have been found to have engaged in sexual misconduct to easily transfer to a new school and resume victimizing students," the judges wrote.

The series found more than 150 coaches who had been reprimanded or fired for sexually abusing female athletes in Washington state. Most continued to teach or coach after the incidents.

The judges cited "Coaches who prey" for its depth and detail in exploring a subject that previously had been examined only episodically, raising public awareness of the problem, providing important advice for parents, and prompting school authorities to conduct better background checks of coaches.

The Newspaper Guild, a sector of the Communication Workers of America, also honored TomPaine.com, an online public-interest journal, with the Herbert Block Freedom Award, named after the late Washington Post cartoonist known as Herblock, whose work defended a vigorous free press.

TomPaine.com was cited for being "a consistent voice of reason and democratic discourse at a time of increased political attacks on civil liberties and a flattening of discourse in the mainstream media."

The Broun and Block awards each come with a $5,000 prize.