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Awards
Review reporter wins national journalism award
March 10, 2004
By Review staff
Daily Business Review staff reporter Dan Christensen has won a national journalism award for a series of articles last year about federal court records secrecy.
Christensen took third place in news beat reporting in the 2004 National Headliner Awards for his series. The Kansas City Star and the Mobile Register took first and second place.
Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. took first place in the contest’s feature column category.
Last March, Christensen was the first to report on the existence of a federal habeas corpus petition in U.S. District Court in Miami that was kept completely secret by the court. The case wasn’t even listed on the court’s public docket.
He also was the first to report that the rulings of the federal district and appellate courts to keep the case sealed were appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which recently rejected the case for review.
Christensen’s articles in the Review prompted the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to file an amicus brief, as well as to launch a study of secrecy in the federal courts. The New York Times, Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, and other publications followed up on the story.
The articles also prompted a coalition of news and legal organizations to seek to intervene in the Supreme Court case and gain public access to information about the case.
Founded in 1934 by the Press Club of Atlantic City, the National Headliner Awards program is one of the oldest and largest annual journalism contests in the country.
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