AUSTIN, Texas — KVUE and the Austin American-Stateman's Tony Plohetski won August's Sidney Award for his coverage of exclusive video depicting police response to the Uvalde shooting.
The monthly Sidney Award goes "to an outstanding piece of journalism" from the month before, according to the Sidney Hillman Foundation website. Nominations can come from the reporter themselves or someone else.
Award winners receive $500 honorarium and a special certificate by Edward Sorel, a cartoonist for "The New Yorker."
Plohetski was the first journalist to obtain and release hallway footage from the May 24 shooting at Uvalde's Robb Elementary School that left 19 students and two teachers dead.
The video showed the failure of police officers that day as they waited over an hour to enter the classroom where the active shooter was located.
“Plohetski’s reporting cut through the self-serving official accounts and changed the national conversation about this tragedy,” award judge Lindsay Beyerstein said in a statement. “We can only hope that learning the truth will be the first step towards meaningful reforms.”
Read Beyerstein's interview with Plohetski here.
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