Collison Wins Honorable Mention in Guild Competition

    In addition to capturing the George S. Polk Award for Local Reporting, Buffalo Guild member Kevin Collison has also received an honorable mention in The Newspaper Guild’s Heywood Broun Award competition.

     The Broun Award has been made annually since 1941 for outstanding journalistic achievement “in the spirit of Heywood Broun,” the nationally-acclaimed newspaper columnist who was the Guild’s founder.

   The spirit of Heywood Broun, according to TNG documents, “was distinguished by an abiding concern for the underdog and underprivileged, whose vigorous champion he was.”

   Both the Broun and Polk awards were conferred on Collison for his reporting on the death of Cynthia Wiggins, a young black woman who was fatally injured after getting off the No. 6 Metro bus to go to work at the Walden Galleria.

   The winner of the 1996 Broun Award was Molly Gordy, a reporter at the New York Daily News, for her series exposing how charlatans posing as doctors victimized New York’s Chinese immigrant population.

   This is the first time in recent memory a member of Local 26 was honored in the Heywood Broun competition.