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2008 ASJA Award Winners It was a great pleasure to help organize this year's awards. Everyone involved was impressed with the depth and breadth of the work being done by ASJA members, which provided us with unique glimpses into unfamiliar worlds, took us on journeys into the dark corners of our psyches or celebrated the best in us. Each panel's most formidable task was picking just one winner out of so many worthy entries. And at a time when print journalism is under siege and the entire publishing industry is in the throes of cataclysmic changes, it's doubly important to salute those who are doing exemplary work. —Linda Marsa, co-chair, Awards Committee First Person, Essay or Personal Experience Article For the last ten years, I have been on a mission: to do one thing a year that terrifies me. The first thing I tried was rock climbing, which was very scary, but I didn't die, and when I reached the summit, I felt empowered. Next, I did a 16-day trip paddling the huge rapids of the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. After that, I summitted Mt. Rainier, climbed to advanced base camp on Everest's north face, trekked high mountain passes in Bhutan, sea kayaked in the Pacific Ocean, ran two marathons, did an Olympic-distance triathlon, drove a Viper on the track in racing school and soared on the north shore of Hawaii. Last year while visiting famous architect Paolo Soleri's Cosanti Foundation, I noticed a sign, "Models Wanted For Paolo Soleri–Must Be Over 21." Posing in the nude was my scare-venture for the year, because taking off my clothes in front of a total stranger was the most terrifying activity I could try. My essay, "The Sense of Being Stared At" is about posing naked for Paolo Soleri, and was published in July by O the Oprah Magazine. Best Service Article We all enjoy penning profiles and engaging in essay writing more than grinding out service articles. But like fruits and vegetables, they're essential. Readers, and therefore editors, demand them. They pay our bills. Profiles and essays? Delicious, but not nutritious, unless you want to literally be a starving writer. The idea behind "Road Tested" was simple. Marathon training programs (pioneered by Team in Training) have flourished, with charities, health clubs and marathon organizers increasingly hiring knowledgeable coaches to oversee multi-week programs. Average Joes and Jills are trained to run their first marathon and an astonishingly high percentage succeed. I realized that the regimens and ideas of the coaches and sports scientists who have designed and overseen these programs had never been examined and compared in one article. That was the inspiration, but as you all know, with service pieces it's all about the perspiration. Endless e-mails and countless calls later, the story was finished. My editor, Jane Hahn, was kind enough to change only a few words. And that was that. The following week (dessert anyone?), I started on a profile. Profiles Jane Bock, the "forensic botanist" I profiled last year for Sierra Magazine, is a plainspoken plant expert whose knowledge has drawn her into crime fighting. She's worked with investigators to gauge the age of a sunflower bouquet left at a murder scene, identify the species of plants found in the stomach of a murder victim and even deduced the variety of golf-course grass collected from a suspect's clothes. As a science reporter, I'm always looking for ways to make sense of science for the public, and I was thrilled to meet Bock, who applies her natural-history skills to problems everyone can relate to: literal matters of life and death. My thanks to my Sierra editors, Joan Hamilton and Marilyn Berlin Snell, for their willingness to take on this unusual environmental story, and to Jane Bock for her game explanations of even the goriest details of her research. Reporting on a Significant Topic My assignment began more or less as a title conceived of by editors at Discover, "Islam and Science." We had a few conference calls to try refining it, but even after I'd set off to travel across the Middle East—from Jordan to Tunisia—I had that dark feeling you get when you're out on a search but don't entirely know what you're looking for. In the course of interviews, though, certain themes began to emerge, and I found that I was actually touching on a sensitive topic—sensitive within the Muslim world and perhaps all the more so because a non-Muslim and an outsider was asking the questions. Although it had its moments of vertigo—the published story involved two fairly major re-writes and quite a few discussions with my editor—it was enormously rewarding to bring it off in the end. In addition to the ASJA award, the story was also selected for Best American Science and Nature Writing 2008 by the New Yorker's Jerome Groopman, the anthology's guest editor this year. Arlene Awards This story grew from my interest in the long-term ecological and social costs of the Vietnam War. I received a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to travel to Vietnam and investigate Agent Orange's legacy there. My New York Times piece described a project by botanist Phunt Tuu Boi to protect minority tribal groups from contaminated soil at a former US base. I was drawn to Boi and his work because he was devising cheap, low-tech solutions to a serious, expensive problem and he was working to help indigenous people who had long been neglected. Boi had begun his green fence project with the help of a modest grant from the World Bank, but he needed $20,000 more to complete the project. After my piece ran, I received dozens of e-mails from readers who wanted to donate to Boi's project. Before long, Boi had collected donations in excess of what he needed to complete the project, and the extra funds will go toward other projects in this central highlands region of Vietnam. The outpouring of support for Boi's project was extremely gratifying to me and served as a reminder about the power of journalism to inform and inspire. Trade Article My piece on the L0pht came from coupling the mundane—the group had dissolved five years earlier—with the ongoing question of whether computer security was any better than it had been when they were a source of controversy. I also was curious about what it had meant that they had mostly gone mainstream. What was gratifying was being able to talk to enough of them to construct a narrative. The group's breakup was bitter, and a number of them had not spoken about it. Donald Robinson Memorial Award for Investigative Journalism Initially, a group of psychologists had approached me, concerned that their trade group, the American Psychological Association, had voted to permit its members to participate in coercive interrogations of detainees. The very notion that psychologists might have supported or aided the coercive interrogations of detainees, was fascinating to me. I became even more curious when none of the reporting really lined up. The allegations (which came from very credible sources) did not match what I was hearing from others, or able to dig out. The more I dug, the more impossible the story seemed—until I finally began to hear murmurs about two other psychologists entirely. They hadn't been on my radar screen, or included in the initial allegations, and suddenly I was dealing with a very different story: Two independent psychologists, hired by the CIA, who were actually the architects of the entire coercive regimen we all had heard about at the CIA's black sites, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. So the ultimate story was far more interesting, difficult—and ultimately important—than the one I'd set out to report. It was hands down the most difficult story I have ever reported (and was not made easier by the fact that I was nine months pregnant and pitched it to Vanity Fair on the day that I went into the hospital to deliver my baby—and began work on it two weeks later!). Note to self: Don't do that again. June Roth Memorial Award
for Medical Journalism The demographic trends that—unless something changes—will cause a significant doctor shortage 15 or 20 years from now are clear, but the issue hasn't received much notice even though experts have been sounding alarms. Showing how aging boomers will overload the healthcare system just as droves of doctors retire or burn out, was important to me not only because it's a significant issue for the medical profession, but because it potentially affects every one of us. To keep the piece from becoming a dry policy discussion, Prevention gave me plenty of room to work in several anecdotes, from both patients and doctors, to help show the impact of the problem and lead into the bottom-line service elements that were critical to readers. It's scary to think you could be having a life-threatening emergency, and a surgeon who is already up to his elbows in another patient would have to say, "I can't help now." The article got started during a transition time at the magazine, so it was assigned by one editor, taken over by another who was promoted, then finished with a third. That could have been difficult but wasn't, because all three are smart, personable and great to work with. I'm honored to have the piece recognized. Service/Self-Help Collaborative Book In early 2005, the local alternative-weekly editor called and asked if I would consider an assignment: 5,000 words about two university researchers who were achieving dramatic turnarounds with seriously troubled adopted children. The story sounded so compelling that I couldn't resist, even though it meant breaking my own rule to no longer work for peanuts. Karyn Purvis, Ph.D. and David Cross, Ph.D. treated me like a fast-track graduate student—encouraging me to sit-in on their therapeutic camp, watch research videos and get up to speed about child development, sensory dysfunction and neurotransmitter studies. I met parents overwhelmed by their child's misbehavior and others who had successfully achieved balance with help from the professors. After my article appeared, Drs. Purvis and Cross asked if I would partner with them to write a parent-friendly book about their methods. I was immensely honored and found the three-way collaboration wonderful; we each brought complementary strengths, mutual respect, and a sense of humor to the table. Writing the proposal, finding our agent, and selling the book at auction all happened by year's end. The Connected Child is now in its fourth printing, and we've got the proposal for our next book underway. ASJA Founders' Award for Career Achievement We honored Sarah Wernick for her career achievement but we were really honoring Sarah herself, and her husband, Willie, who was there to accept her award. Sarah was a strong role model as a writer. At nearly 40, abandoning a career in academia, she taught herself how to write, then how to write for a popular audience, then how to write a bestseller. She was tough on herself and others, nondefensively welcoming any feedback that improved a manuscript. She told us how to initiate a project and not passively wait to pick up the crumbs others dropped. She freely gave advice, including:
As a child, said her brother Pete, she was smart, resourceful, loyal, really good with words, and willing to put herself out for those she cared for. She was also "very particular." At Bronx High School of Science she fell in with a group of brainy kids she could relate to, including Willie Lockeretz. She studied Russian. The CIA invited her to be a spy, and she declined. (That's why we're in the mess we're in.) Toward the end of college she rediscovered Willie, a gentle, decent, funny man and her best friend for life. In accepting Sarah's award, Willie said that it was as if, during high school, he'd offered his "first page" (a reference to Sarah's wonderful book proposal workshop) and she'd decided it wasn't good enough. Then after college he'd presented the full proposal, and she'd accepted. "When I married Sarah I soon realized that I had agreed to an all-rights contract," Willie told the awards audience, "and even forfeited rights that had not been invented yet." No prizes are being awarded in categories not listed. If we had more time and space, we would have had several honorable mentions. Thanks to everyone who participated in the contest and be sure to start saving your clips for next year's contest now.
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