The Florida Bar recently recognized the winners of the 2024 Parker Thomson Awards for Outstanding Legal Journalism in Florida. The 2024 award recipients are represented in two categories, print and television. Award recipients receive $500 for first place; second-place honorees receive $250. The Bar also recognized a winner for the Susan Spencer-Wendel Lifetime Achievement Award. The award recipient receives a cash prize of $500 and travel reimbursement to attend the awards ceremony. All honorees and their media outlets receive plaques.
The winners are recognized during the 2024 Florida Media Conference in July sponsored by the Florida Press Association and Foundation. The awards are presented by The Florida Bar’s Media & Communications Law Committee for outstanding journalism highlighting the system of law and justice as it affects Floridians. Judges for both The Parker Thomson Awards and The Susan Spencer-Wendel Lifetime Achievement Award are composed of out-of-state journalists, media lawyers and media educators.
THE WINNERS:
Susan Spencer-Wendel Lifetime Achievement Award presented to Gregory Fox
PRINT:
First Prize: Dan Sullivan, Tampa Bay Times, “Death penalty changes are eyed”
Second Prize: Michael Moline, Florida Phoenix, ““A monumental abortion question for FL Supreme Court: How did voters in 1980 define ‘privacy’?”
TELEVISION:
First Prize: Evan Dean and Kirk Erwin, WBBH, “Cape Coral man shares his story of restorative justice and rehabilitation”
Second Prize: Peter Delis and Gregory Fox, WESH – TV 2 NBC, “Zeigler: Last Chance for Freedom”
The Parker Thomson Awards honor news stories, series, features, editorials, blogs, documentaries, columns, special sections — anything that is produced by a news organization and deals with law and lawyers, courts, law enforcement, the delivery of legal services, the effectiveness of the justice system, the work of the organized Bar or related matters. This year’s awards honored works published or produced in 2023. Thomson was a Florida attorney who, from 1968 to 1983, represented numerous prominent clients in First Amendment cases. He argued three cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, including Miami Herald Publishing Company v. Tornillo in 1974. He won that case, helping to overturn a state law that required newspapers to allocate equal space to political candidates on the editorial pages. Thomson died in 2017 at the age of 85.
The Susan Spencer-Wendel Lifetime Achievement Award honors a retired or working journalist who has written or reported extensively in an outstanding fashion to educate citizens on the system of law and justice as it affects the people of Florida. Susan Spencer-Wendel was a veteran Palm Beach Post courts reporter who died in 2014 after a well-documented fight with ALS. She received a lifetime achievement award from The Florida Bar’s Media & Communications Law Committee in 2012 and numerous other media awards throughout her career.
Original source can be found here.