Transcript for
The 2004 James K. Batten Symposium
& Awards for Innovations in Journalism

September 10, 2004
National Press Club
Washington, D.C.

Awards Ceremony
Presented by Bryan Monroe, Assistant Vice President-News, Knight-Ridder Newspapers

Jan Schaffer: Today with us to present the winners of this year's Batten Awards is Bryan Monroe, the assistant vice president of news for Knight-Ridder Newspapers. He's in charge of all Knight-Ridder’s 32 newspapers and he's chairman of the Batten Award Advisory Board. I should figure out a way to throw up images as we hand out awards.

Bryan Monroe: Well, since I'm the only one between you and lunch, or in some of you all's cases, you and some money, we're going to make this quick.

First of all, thank you again for coming out this morning and thank you to all the presenters and all the nominees and those who have entered the contest. Let's give everyone a quick round of applause. I also wanted to thank Jan -- Where did Jan go? She just ran out the door -- for putting all this together. She and her team and Julie -- yep, they both ran out -- have really been doing all the hard work to make this -- there they are -- have been doing all the hard work to make this day and really this year a success, and for us in the judging team making everything go so smoothly that all we had to do was look at some really, really fantastic work. So, thank you.

I want to very quickly get to the winners. We were fortunate this year to have over -- what did we have? -- seventy-some entries, and they were of incredible quality.

One of the things giving the history of the Batten Awards for Innovation was Jim Batten, who is the former CEO of Knight-Ridder, who passed away, I knew Jim and he was the salt of the earth, a journalist’s journalist, but he was also a great leader and a great innovator. He helped sponsor a project that I worked on several years ago called the 2543 project, [which] some of you might [remember] as the Boca project that we did, oh my gosh, 15 years ago ­ I've got gray hair and everything ­ where among many of our goals he told us to go out on the edge of the tree limb and jump up and down. If the tree limb doesn't break, take another step and jump and down. If it still doesn't break, take another step, jump up and down until it breaks and take a step down.

And that was incredibly liberating to come from the CEO of the second largest newspaper company in America, to be able to create an environment where you could take your core principles of journalism, of storytelling, and test them and experiment and try some things. And that spirit has really been captured in this competition and has really been captured in our finalists, as well. Each of them has taken chances, has gone out and tried to find fresh and truly innovative ways to tell stories and to do great journalism.

So what we have is three awards of distinction, a $2,000 runner-up and, of course, our $10,000 grand prize. We're going to start backwards and work up. Our first award of distinction goes to the Providence Journal and Projo.com. Are they here?

Congratulations. There you go, and the money for the award. The Providence Journal package, as you saw earlier, was a truly wonderful, intimate, interactive database that allowed readers to create a Web page for an individual soldier, sort of like the old letters from the Civil War, and you could go on there and truly interact and post your own comments and talk about this person and their life and how they work with the troops and the family in the neighborhoods and communities. It was simple, low tech, but very powerful. Thank you Providence.

Our next award of distinction goes to another project. One of the great things about all of these projects [was that] they really ran the gamut from the low-tech, simple, clean, effective to the very beautiful, elegant, visually compelling Flash high-tech music and sound. I mean, each of them used the technology that they had to tell stories well. So our next award of distinction goes to USAToday.com. Congratulations. The USA Today Sing My Song project was that coverage of West Virginia's new song festival through community participants’ eyes, conceived for the Web. It was an expensive extended four-page inside the paper. Users could vote their five favorite songs and compare the picks with judge's selections, very interactive, very engaging.

A third award of distinction was another extremely compelling project and it was impressive to hear how quickly it was pulled together on such a small staff and in a tight timeframe. The CBC’s “The Nature of Things.” Congratulations. Just some truly compelling storytelling there, and I really appreciated the small touches, the small detail. You saw the animation with the plane and the scene from the cockpit matched the actual facts of the crash. And here it was about three guys, nine days, a couch and probably a lot of Jolt Cola, very impressive.