Seattle Times reporters given Poe award for MRSA series

Two Seattle Times reporters were honored Saturday night at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner for their three-part series "Culture of Resistance," an investigation into the unchecked rise of MRSA infections in the state's hospitals.

Michael J. Berens and Ken Armstrong won the Edgar A. Poe Memorial Award from the White House Correspondents' Association. The award honors excellence in coverage of news of national or regional significance.

The investigative series led to new laws that heightened infection controls and patient-safety standards at Washington hospitals. State health regulators now will conduct surprise inspections at hospitals. They had been required to give hospitals four weeks' notice of any visits.

Additionally, hospitals must screen at-risk patients for MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a potentially deadly antibiotic-resistant germ that has reached epidemic levels in the state and nationally.

Among the 2,000 attendees at Saturday's annual fundraising gala were President Obama and his wife, as well as many of the most recognizable people in the news media, politics, and the television and movie industries.

Michael Abramowitz, formerly of The Washington Post, was awarded the Aldo Beckman Award for sustained excellence in White House coverage. The Merriman Smith Award for presidential coverage under deadline pressure went to David Greene of National Public Radio and to Sandra Sobieraj-Westfall of People magazine.

The Times' "Culture of Resistance" has won two other major journalism awards this year. The series won top honors from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers in the "projects" category for large newspapers.

Berens and Armstrong also won top honors from Investigative Reporters and Editors in the large newspaper category, which includes those with circulations between 250,000 and 500,000. The IRE Award is one of journalism's highest awards for watchdog reporting.

Online, the series provided a searchable database of hospitals and MRSA cases. The series can be read at: www.seattletimes.com/mrsa