T-Squared: The Texas Tribune wins national Edward R. Murrow Award for overall excellence

The Texas Tribune was a national winner of the 2022 Edward R. Murrow Awards, announced Thursday by the Radio Television Digital News Association, which recognized the Tribune for overall excellence in the category of large digital news organizations.

“The Edward R. Murrow Awards are among the most prestigious in journalism,” RTDNA President and CEO Dan Shelley said in a statement. “More than 750 Regional Murrow winners advanced to the national competition, and over the past few months, an expert panel of journalists has meticulously reviewed and deliberated over every entry. That’s why I’m confident in saying today’s winners represent the absolute best of the best. So let me be the first to say congratulations to our newest National Edward R. Murrow Award winners.”

In its award entry, the Tribune cited its coverage of the February 2021 winter storm and reporting on the once-a-decade redrawing of federal and state legislative districts, as well as coverage of major debates over voting rights and abortion rights. We noted our use of data visualizations to tell the story of political representation, particularly for communities of color; our coverage of three special sessions of the Texas Legislature; a video on broadband access in rural areas; and our Texas Tribune Festival, which was held virtually in 2021 for the second year in a row as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. (The festival returns in person this year, Sept. 22-24 in Austin.)

“In 2021, The Texas Tribune produced coverage that sought to protect the health and lives of Texans and the health and life of Texas democracy,” we wrote in our award entry.

The national Edward R. Murrow awards recognized more than 100 outlets for outstanding work in digital, radio and television journalism in technical and editorial categories.

In the category of large digital news organizations, the other winners were: Al Jazeera Digital for its coverage of the Taliban takeover of Kabul; ProPublica, in partnership with WGBH’s “Frontline,” for its coverage of the Jan. 6 riot and ongoing extremism in America; The Boston Globe for the second season of “A Beautiful Resistance,” a series on Black love and Black joy; ProPublica, in partnership with The Texas Tribune and Mountain State Spotlight, for a series on cancer-causing industrial air pollution; Pineapple Street Studios, in partnership with Amazon Music and Wondery, for Dan Taberski’s “9/12,” about the world after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; Insider for an article on how Jeffrey Epstein’s phone book ended up on a farm in Vermont; STAT, for an article titled “How Medicine Erased Black Women From a ‘White Man’s Disease’”; Al Jazeera Digital for feature reporting on missing and murdered indigenous women and girls; the streaming news program “Real America With Jorge Ramos” for coverage of Haiti on edge; The Markup, in partnership with Gizmodo, for an investigation into algorithmic bias; The New York Times for a documentary on the Jan. 6 storming of U.S. Capitol; Al Jazeera Digital for a series visualizing the Afghan War; C13Originals, a division of the podcast studio Cadence13, for “Gone South,” about the killing of a prosecutor in Louisiana in 1987; and the podcast studio Wondery for coverage of the Afghan women’s soccer team’s escape from Kabul.

The full program is now LIVE for the 2022 The Texas Tribune Festival, happening Sept. 22-24 in Austin. Explore the schedule of 100+ mind-expanding conversations coming to TribFest, including the inside track on the 2022 elections and the 2023 legislative session, the state of public and higher ed at this stage in the pandemic, why Texas suburbs are booming, why broadband access matters, the legacy of slavery, what really happened in Uvalde and so much more. See the program.