It was bound to happen again.
Jim Lockwood (pictured on left), a reporter for the Times-Tribune in Scranton, Pa., has been named the 2023 winner of PNRC’s Michael Kramer Public Notice Journalism Award.
The award was announced yesterday as part of the National Newspaper Association Foundation’s 2023 Better Newspaper Editorial Contest. Lockwood previously won the prize in 2015 and came in second place, or tied for second, every year since then except 2022.
The award is given annually to the best reporting that uses public notice as a primary source of information.
Bank notice big news in small town
On a December day in 2019, Alyssa Meier (pictured at left) was at work at The Leader-News in Washburn, N.D. when she received an email from a local bank announcing its intention to publish a public notice, but its subject had to be kept confidential.
Meier had seen plenty of public notices in her newspaper career, but never a secret one.
“We have a pretty good relationship with the bank, and they sent me a kind of bizarre email about a confidential legal, so I set up a phone call with the bank president right away,” Meier said in a telephone interview.