Post and Courier team's fire coverage wins top award

Tyrone Walker
The Post and Courier

A firefighter walks in front of the burning Sofa Super Store in Charleston, S.C., Monday, June 18, 2007. Nine firefighters died fighting the fire which destroyed the store and a warehouse.

A team of Post and Courier reporters has received first-place honors for deadline writing in a prestigious national journalism competition for its coverage of the Sofa Super Store fire that killed nine Charleston firefighters.

The American Society of Newspaper Editors awarded The Post and Courier its 2008 Jesse Laventhol Prize for deadline news reporting by a team. The award recognizes the newspaper's coverage of the immediate aftermath of the June 18 blaze in West Ashley.

Finalists in the competition included The Washington Post for its reporting on the Virginia Tech shootings that left 33 dead in April and The Omaha World-Herald for its coverage of a December mass shooting at a Nebraska mall. The competition was open to all daily newspapers and wire services, and some 50 entries were received for the deadline writing contest.

The Post and Courier will receive the award in April at the society's national conference in Washington.

"I am very proud of this award because it recognizes the extraordinary teamwork involved in producing a great newspaper in a matter of hours that revealed the full extent of the tragedy," Executive Editor Bill Hawkins said.

"Yet, I am even more proud of our sustained coverage of the fire and its aftermath, and the role our journalism has played in helping bring about changes that will save lives. That work has involved virtually everyone in our newsroom," he said.

The sofa store blaze started as a small trash fire and turned into an inferno, consuming the massive furniture outlet and overwhelming firefighters inside. As the hours passed, the grim toll became clear: Nine men had died inside the store.

Editors at The Post and Courier quickly recognized the scale and historic significance of the tragedy and dispatched a team of reporters and photographers to cover every facet of the event.

The result was seven full pages of coverage, including a narrative account of the fire, updates on the investigation into its cause, profiles of each of the fallen firefighters and a revealing interview with a store worker whom firefighters rescued.

Contributing to the coverage were reporters Tony Bartelme, Robert Behre, Nita Birmingham, Eddie Fennell, Prentiss Findlay, Noah Haglund, Jessica Johnson, Schuyler Kropf, Ron Menchaca, Nadine Parks, Bo Petersen, David Slade, Glenn Smith, Katy Stech, Kyle Stock and Tenisha Waldo.

The American Society of Newspaper Editors is the premier organization of editors in the Americas and annually recognizes excellence in the journalistic crafts of writing and photography. The competition is designed to foster and reward the finest writing in daily newspapers and wire services and the most outstanding community service photojournalism.

The Laventhol Prizes are endowed with a gift from David Laventhol in honor of his father, Jesse Laventhol, a reporter for newspapers in Philadelphia in the 1920s and 1930s.