Crosscut receives Kenneth Bunting Award for outstanding journalism

The Washington Coalition for Open Government will present its 2022 Kenneth Bunting Award to online news site Crosscut for its ongoing series, Washington Recovery Watch. The project relies heavily on government records to tell the public how agencies statewide are spending billions of federal funds for pandemic relief and infrastructure.

The coalition also will recognize several journalists and news organizations with Key Awards for their exemplary work with public records and stories about open government issues in 2022. WashCOG will present the awards at its annual Sunshine Breakfast on March 17 at T-Mobile Park in Seattle.

The Bunting Award recognizes journalists and media outlets for work that uses or advances Washington state’s open government laws, or educates citizens about them. The award honors the memory of the late Ken Bunting, an executive editor and associate publisher with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer who helped found WashCOG in 2002. He also served as executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition from 2010 to 2014, the year he died.

Journalists at Seattle-based Crosscut spent months poring over such documents as spending resolutions, budgets and audit reports to track the enormous sums of federal money pouring into Washington state.

They followed the money to state agencies, local governments, tribal programs, nonprofits and businesses. The records became source material for more than 30 stories that Crosscut published and made freely available to other media outlets.

Crosscut’s journalists examined such issues as the obstacles of red tape, the uneven distribution of pandemic relief money and the decisions by six Washington cities to reject $2.3 million in combined federal aid.

The news nonprofit posted documents and databases online so readers could explore for themselves. Crosscut’s document library is located at https://crosscut.com/WA-Recovery-Watch/Follow-the-funds.

Crosscut also held a free public workshop that explained the newsroom’s reporting as well as state and federal public records laws. WashCOG was a co-presenter for the online event. More than 50 people attended.

Crosscut’s journalists brought into sharp focus enormous federal spending programs that otherwise would have been difficult for the public to comprehend because of their scale, fragmentation and long time frames.

WashCOG also gave Crosscut a Key Award for this reporting project in September.

Our field of Bunting Award nominees was extremely competitive this year, so much so that WashCOG elected to recognize the runners-up with Key Awards. They are, in alphabetical order:

Carolyn Bick, the South Seattle Emerald. Bick relied heavily on records to examine the Seattle Office of Police Accountability’s compliance with the Public Records Act and records retention laws.

Sydney Brownstone and Greg Kim, The Seattle Times. Brownstone and Kim navigated spotty transparency laws and agency compliance to tell the public about deaths at the King County Jail, including the facility’s high suicide rate.

Wilson Criscione, InvestigateWest. As news editor of The Inlander in Spokane, Criscione used records requests to obtain correspondence that revealed how Eastern State Hospital supervisors managed a staff nurse who was later accused of murder.

Lewis Kamb and Daniel Beekman, The Seattle Times. Kamb and Beekman in 2022 repeatedly wrote about public records disputes, mismanagement and apparent violations at Seattle City Hall. Kamb later joined Axios; he is currently at NBC.

Mike Reicher and Lulu Ramadan, The Seattle Times, and ProPublica. Reichner, Ramadan, The Seattle Times and ProPublica called attention to the lack of transparency and accountability at private schools that take public special education students. More recently, The Seattle Times prevailed in a public records lawsuit against the Northwest School of Innovative Learning.

Rachel Riley, The Daily Herald (Everett). Riley used court documents and public records to tell her community how thousands of Boeing Co. employees have been exposed to dangerous chemicals in the workplace.

Eric Rosane and Cameron Probert, The Tri-City Herald. Rosane and Probert used newsbreaks to tell the public about the Richland School Board’s apparent transparency violations – including a board member’s admission that she intentionally deleted text messages.

Daniel Walters, The Inlander.  Walters relied in part on public records to tell his community the story of the Wolfe and New Washington apartment buildings, where 19 low-income tenants died in six years.