Good journalism

Mike at Spring City Chronicle helped win an award ...for the Waukesha Freeman.

The awards included a firstplace prize in investigative reporting by Freeman reporter Kollin Kosmicki and his series of stories about former Waukesha Alderman Glenn Savoie, who was discovered to have solicited prostitution from two girls – a 12-year-old and a 14-year-old – and spent 16 months incarcerated after violating terms of probation and a subsequent prostitution offense.

“It was one of those stories where the media brought light to a problem, so it’s nice to get recognized for my part in that,” said Kosmicki, now managing editor of the News-Graphic newspaper in Cedarburg.

The Spring City Chronicle was the first to break the story of Savoie's checkered past. For some reason I thought of this:

Later on he had an idea - to build a city out of a desert stop-over for GI's on the way to the West Coast. That kid's name was Moe Green - and the city he invented was Las Vegas. This was a great man - a man of vision and guts. And there isn't even a plaque - or a signpost - or a statue of him in that town!

Some time ago, I wrote in an e-mail to another blogger that in a few years I would be at a conference of bloggers and see a bunch of Wisconsin Newspaper Association members in attendance. It's also entirely possible that in a few years we may start seeing bloggers getting honored by the Wisconsin Newspaper Association. That's still a few years off, and there's some work to be done proving that some bloggers in Wisconsin are actually writers.

That having been said, I do want to congratulate the Waukesha Freeman for winning eight awards this year, especially fellow opinion page columnist Pete Kennedy:

The Freeman also received second-place honors in the following categories: editorial page, local columnist (Pete Kennedy), feature writing, spot news photography and overall page design.

Third-place prizes recognized the paper’s work in all-around newspaper photography and enterprise/ interpretive reporting for a retrospective series marking the one-year anniversary of the shooting murders committed by Terry Ratzmann, a New Berlin man who killed seven others and then himself at a church service inside a Brookfield hotel in 2005.

The Freeman competed against newspapers from throughout Wisconsin with similar circulation.

Gives me something to shoot for this year.

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