07/15/2003

AP honors nine staffers for excellence with 10th annual Gramling awards

The Associated Press has named nine staff members from around the world as winners of its 10th annual Oliver S. Gramling Awards for excellence.

The award and scholarship winners include journalists who played special roles in chronicling the war in Iraq, a technical specialist who created a device to aid photo coverage of major news events, an elections analyst who devised a Web-based projections tool and a correspondent with a half-century of service who has been instrumental in building AP's reputation in Latin America.

"They are fine examples of the wide range of excellence within the AP,'' AP President and CEO Tom Curley said.

The awards are given annually to staff members whose work and initiative contribute significantly to the news report and to overall AP operations. A committee of bureau and department managers selected the winners, who were nominated by their colleagues.

The awards are named for Oliver S. Gramling, an AP newsman and executive who in 1941 developed AP's first wire for radio stations. Gramling bequeathed his estate to AP when he died in 1992, with instructions it be used for AP staff members nominated for excellence by their colleagues.

The winners in each award category:

– $10,000 Gramling Journalism Awards for excellence: Jerome Delay, a London-based photographer who was one of the few Western journalists to stay in Baghdad during the war, for providing a compelling multimedia look at life and death in Iraq; and Washington Broadcast reporter Ross Simpson, the first AP staffer to report from a military unit inside Iraq, for embodying AP's 21st-century trend toward "convergence'' with his audio, video and print reporting.

– $10,000 Gramling Achievement Awards: Fong Lien, a technical service manager in Los Angeles, for creating a photo workstation, affectionally nicknamed the "FongMinder,'' that allows comprehensive photo coverage of special events such as the Oscars, World Series and NBA playoffs; and David Pace, lead elections analyst in Washington, D.C., who created a Web-based projections tool that helped AP make swift, accurate calls in all 50 states in the 2002 U.S. elections.

– $3,000 Gramling Spirit Awards: Sergio Carrasco, correspondent in Santiago, Chile, for being a standard bearer for AP in Latin America for 50 years and a mentor for generations of reporters who call him "Maestro''; and Edith Lederer, United Nations correspondent, for her body of work covering the hot spots of the world for more than three decades.

– $3,000 Gramling Scholarship Awards: Guthrie Collin, a systems manager in MegaSports, who will use his award to continue his computer engineering courses at the City College of New York; Lauren Frayer, a newswoman in Washington Broadcast, who will take advanced Arabic courses and earn credit toward a master's degree in Arab Studies at Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies; and Christine Tash, corporate design manager, for a master of arts media studies program at The New School in New York City. Her courses will focus on how print, broadcast and the Internet are affected by changing information technologies, law and economics.

Founded in 1848, The Associated Press is the world's oldest and largest newsgathering organization, providing content to more than 15,000 news outlets with a daily reach of 1 billion people around the world. Its multimedia services are distributed by satellite and the Internet to more than 120 nations.