NY Daily News wins 2 top National Headliner Awards; broadcasters in DC, Indy also honored

NY Daily News wins 2 top National Headliner Awards

TRENTON, N.J. — The New York Daily News has won two top honors in the 76th annual National Headliner Awards.

The newspaper won grand awards in the news and photo categories for its coverage of a pilot’s safe landing of a crippled US Airways jetliner in the Hudson River in January 2009, dubbed the Miracle on the Hudson.

Broadcasters WTOP Radio in Washington, D.C., and WTHR-TV in Indianapolis also were honored Wednesday with grand awards, the highest prizes given as part of the national journalism contest run by The Press Club of Atlantic City, N.J.

The Headliner Awards were first handed out in 1934, making the competition one of journalism’s oldest.

Each of the four grand awards announced this week comes with a $1,500 prize.

In the print division, judges cited the Daily News for its extensive coverage of Flight 1549’s water landing after both its engines were disabled in a collision with a flock of geese on Jan. 15, 2009. They called the newspaper’s reporting “a grand achievement that captures the drama, the shocks and the miracles of an extraordinary day.”

The winning grand prize photo, which ran on the newspaper’s front page the day after the landing, was taken by Bruno Bourachdene. It showed the jetliner floating on the river — and the passengers standing on a wing.

In the broadcast division, WTOP got the nod for a story by Brennan Haselton on a local street musician who plays a harp he made out of nearly 60 drinking glasses, which are secured to a wooden soundboard with a slew of rubber bands.

WTHR-TV won for a story Scott Swan and Steve Rhodes did on a teacher who annually writes birthday letters to every student he has had in class during his roughly 30 years at a local religious school.