Herald wins awards for Hanford series, photos

The Tri-City Herald received a second-place journalism award for its nine-day series on the effects of the Hanford layoffs.

The Herald's second-place Debby Lowman Award for Distinguished Reporting of Consumer Affairs and other C.B. Blethen Memorial Awards for newspaper reporting were announced Thursday at the annual meeting of the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Association in Portland.

Herald reporters and photographers took a closer look at what the 2,000 layoffs at the Hanford nuclear reservation would mean to Tri-Citians and our economy in the series called, "Hanford Layoffs: The Ripple Effect."

Herald photographer Paul T. Erickson won the top feature award in this year's Washington-Oregon Associated Press Photo Contest.

Erickson's Turnin' and Burnin, a dramatic in-cockpit photo of an Air National Guard pilot preparing for an airshow, won the Reid Blackburn Memorial Award for the best feature photo.

Herald photographer Richard Dickin took third place in the non-metro news category.

And Herald reporter Ty Beaver won a first-place award for investigative reporting for a story he wrote while working at a newspaper in Klamath Falls, Ore., before moving to the Tri-Cities.

This story was originally published September 14, 2012 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Herald wins awards for Hanford series, photos ."