In addition to the awards banquet, the Great Plains Journalism Awards has a professional development workshop on the same day, April 27.
Past competitions have hosted Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists as judges and presenters, and this year’s lineup is proving to be just as exciting.
Three Pulitzer-Prize winners — Lane DeGregory of the Tampa Bay Times (formerly the St. Petersburg Times), Barbara Davidson of the Los Angeles Times and Louise Kiernan, a professor at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University — will present workshops this year. They will also join judge Jason Wambsgans, photographer for the Chicago Tribune, in determining the winners of this year’s competition.
DeGregory graduated from the University of Virginia, where she was editor-in-chief of the Cavalier Daily student newspaper. Later, she earned a master’s degree in rhetoric and communication studies from the University of Virginia.
For 10 years, she wrote for the Virginian-Pilot, based in Norfolk, Va. In 2000, DeGregory moved to Florida to write for the St. Petersburg Times. Her stories have appeared in the Best Newspaper Writing editions of 2000, 2004, 2006 and 2008. She has spoken at writing conferences and universities across the country, and has won more than a dozen national awards including a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2009 for her story about a feral child, “The Girl In The Window.”
Barbara Davidson has been a staff photographer for The Times since 2007. Before coming to Los Angeles, she worked at the Dallas Morning News, the Washington Times and the Record in Ontario, Canada.
Davidson has covered conflicts and in-depth, issue-driven stories around the globe. She has documented humanitarian crisis brought on by war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Congo, Israel, Gaza and Bosnia. She documented the tsunami disaster in 2004, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Sichuan earthquake in China in 2008.
In 2006, Davidson was named newspaper photographer of the year by the Pictures of the Year International competition. She won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography with seven fellow staff members for their work depicting the pain and chaos in New Orleans and Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina. In 2009, she won the Visa d’Or daily press award for her coverage of the earthquake in China.
She graduated from Concordia University with a bachelor’s degree in photography and film studies.
Davidson won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for “Victims of Gang Violence,” her stunning series of images charting the terrible odyssey of the innocent victims caught in the crossfire. The series ran in the Los Angeles Times print edition over three days last December and as an impressive online photo gallery and video presentation.
Kiernan, a former reporter and editor at the Chicago Tribune, spent 10 years as special projects reporter at the newspaper. She won a 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting as lead writer of a four-part series on problems with air travel. Kiernan also worked as an urban affairs team editor and reporter, directing coverage of issues such as housing and immigration and specializing in writing about social policy, including welfare reform, poverty and juvenile justice.
She earned a B.A. at the University of Virginia, a master’s degree at Medill and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard.