The Oregonian of Portland, which won the breaking news award, used video and other online features to tell the story of a family missing in the mountains. All three of the finalists in the editorial cartooning category, including winner Walt Handelsman of Newsday on Long Island, submitted animated cartoons along with their print entries.
Other journalism winners were Andrea Elliott of the New York Times, the feature award winner for her portrait of an immigrant imam in America; Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for her commentaries; Oded Balilty of the Associated Press in breaking news for his photo of a lone Jewish woman defying Israeli security forces in the West Bank; and Renee C. Byer of the Sacramento Bee for feature photography, a series on a single mother and her young son as he loses his battle with cancer.
Almost from the time he began covering the oceans for The Times five years ago, Weiss said he was struck by the similarities in the research of many scientists.
"All their charts and graphs looked the same, whether it was fish or coral reefs or habitat areas -- they all fell off precipitously sometime in the 1980s or '90s," Weiss said. "The drop is so dramatic they call them waterfall charts. Some of these veteran scientists began to study that pattern. I just followed their lead."
His reporting took him up the Pacific Coast and around the world, along with photographer Loomis. Their reports showed how "industrial society is overdosing the oceans with basic nutrients -- the nitrogen, carbon, iron and phosphorous compounds that curl out of smokestacks and tailpipes, wash into the sea from fertilized lawns and cropland, seep out of septic tanks and gush from sewer pipes."
The effects were systematic -- 80% of the corals in the Caribbean wiped out, 75% of California's kelp forests destroyed -- and intimate. The "Altered Oceans" reports drew readers in by detailing the suffering and ultimate death of a California sea lion named Neuschwander (after the lifeguard who rescued her); depicting Australian fishermen losing not only their skin but their livelihoods to a venomous weed that can cover an area the size of San Francisco Bay; and sharing the travails of a Florida family driven from their home by the toxic breeze blowing from a noxious ocean algae bloom.
