Released: 02/15/2006

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - Seven different newspapers won a total of 10 McClatchy President's Awards for excellence during the second half of 2005. Three newspapers captured two awards each and four papers won a single award.

"This was an unusually large number of winners and the kinds of work show unusual range," said Howard Weaver, McClatchy's vice president, news. "We typically honor six or eight winners from each six-month period, but judges in this round found 10 entries they thought ought to receive awards."

The Anchorage Daily News, The News & Observer in Raleigh and The Sacramento Bee each won two awards. Prizes also went to winners at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, The Island Packet in Hilton Head, The Beaufort Gazette and The News Tribune in Tacoma. All McClatchy dailies and their websites are eligible for the contest, which awards prizes every six months.

Spokane Spokesman-Review editor Steve Smith and Heidi de Laubenfels, assistant managing editor for visuals and technology at The Seattle Times, were outside judges for the competition.

Included among prizewinners in this round were a pair of animated sports cartoons from Raleigh's online division and a multi-platform effort aimed at reaching young readers in Anchorage. A personal opinion essay from Tacoma and an Alaska photographer's year-long quest to define beauty were also among the winners.

Judges honored two Sacramento Bee projects: "he Pineros," an investigation into unsafe and unfair working conditions of mostly immigrant forest workers, and a detailed reexamination of flood dangers in the California capital called "Tempting Fate." The forest workers project was done by Tom Knudson and Hector Amezcua; the flooding report was the work of Deb Kollars, Matt Weiser and Carrie Peyton Dahlberg.

In Minneapolis, Star Tribune writer Josephine Marcotty was honored for "What killed Reece Meikle?" a touching illumination of a Minnesota teenager’s death from a mysterious disease that never was identified.

In Tacoma, The News Tribune's Patrick O'Callahan illuminated debate over smoking in Washington State with a moving memoir of his mother's death from cigarette addiction.

In Raleigh, News & Observer reporters Dan Kane and J. Andrew Curliss teamed up on relentless reporting that tracked down and exposed conflicts of interest in the politics and operations of North Carolina’s infant state lottery. Also in Raleigh, Grey Blackwell created animated, online cartoons lampooning the region's high-profile college football coaches and drew a quarter-million viewers to the site.

The Anchorage Daily News teamed up for a three-part effort aimed at reaching younger readers. The entertainment and nightlife coverage includes a free-distribution entertainment "Hotsheet," a website where readers and staffers both contribute to coverage, and a revamped weekly newspaper section called "Play" that provides more comprehensive coverage. Also a winner in Anchorage was photographer Bob Hallinen, whose idea for exploring how and why people are so interested in beauty yielded a multi-part photo project called "Eye on Beauty."

In South Carolina's Lowcountry, both McClatchy dailies won awards for community service journalism. At The Beaufort Gazette, reporter Michael Shea won for a series called "Ports in the Storm" that explained the apparent recalcitrance of the state ports' commission to approve important local projects. In Hilton Head, a team of reporters at The Island Packet provided a detailed look at how local property taxes were being unevenly and apparently unfairly applied across the region.

Judges comments and links to winning entries can be found at www.mcclatchy.com/about/featured_works.

The McClatchy Company, headquartered in Sacramento, Calif., is a leading newspaper and internet publisher. It publishes 12 daily and 17 non-daily newspapers located in western coastal states, North and South Carolina, and the Twin Cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul. McClatchy has daily circulation of 1.4 million and Sunday circulation of 1.8 million. McClatchy's newspapers include, among others, the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, The Sacramento Bee, The Fresno Bee and The Modesto Bee in California, The News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.), The News Tribune (Tacoma, Wash.) and the Anchorage Daily News.

McClatchy also operates leading local websites in each of its daily newspaper markets, offering readers information, comprehensive news, advertising, e-commerce and other services, and owns and operates McClatchy Interactive, an interactive operation that provides websites with content, publishing tools and software development. McClatchy is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol MNI.

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