Transportation Safety Journalists Encouraged to Apply for 2023 Casey Feldman Award
The Casey Feldman Foundation is pleased to announce that we are accepting entries until September 1, 2023 for the second annual Casey Feldman Award for Transportation Safety Reporting.
The award recognizes outstanding work in the area of transportation safety journalism and honors Casey Feldman, a senior journalism student at Fordham University who was killed by a distracted driver in 2009. It is sponsored by the Casey Feldman Foundation and the journalism department at the College of Media, Communication and Information at the University of Colorado Boulder. Casey Feldman’s parents, Joel Feldman and Dianne Anderson, created the foundation to provide scholarships for students and to support work that will help put an end to distracted driving.
The Casey Feldman Award recognizes exceptional work produced between July 1, 2022, and June 30, 2023, by a reporter or reporting team in print and/or online platforms in the United States. Entries should take the form of a story or series about one topic or event related to transportation safety. The winner receives a $2,000 prize; two honorable mentions of $500 each also will be awarded. The publication time frame has changed this year, so entrants are eligible to resubmit non-winning entries from the 2022 contest for consideration.
The 2022 award went to Jesse Coburn and Streetsblog NYC for “Always Scared: Dangerous Streets Outside City Schools Threaten Children,” a story that looked at unsafe streets and mapped crashes that occurred near schools. Honorable mentions in the 2022 contest were awarded to Marin Cogan and Vox for “The Deadliest Road in America” and to Mike Lindblom of the Seattle Times for “Seattle’s Most Dangerous Light-Rail Stretch — And How to Make it Safer.”
Joel Feldman said it’s that kind of journalism that he and Dianne Anderson want to encourage through this award.
“My daughter Casey had a passion for journalism. At the time of her death she was news editor of her college newspaper,” he said. “In expressing their condolences, many of her colleagues told us that Casey taught them that reporters have the power to change the world for the better by telling great stories.
“Recognizing the power of the press to amplify what all of us who are involved in transportation safety do, my wife and I created an award for transportation reporters in Casey’s memory,” Feldman said. “By doing so we wanted to encourage and reward reporters who tell great stories that are helping to keep us safer on our roads.”
Applicants can submit their work through the Casey Feldman Award page on the CMCI website until 11:59 p.m. Sept. 1. Entries should include PDF files of, or links to, relevant stories, along with a letter of nomination from the entrant and/or their sponsoring publication. The entry fee is $50 per submission. Please send questions to [email protected].
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About the Casey Feldman Foundation
The Casey Feldman Foundation is a 501(c)(3) public charity that was founded by Joel Feldman and Dianne Anderson after Casey’s death. Its purpose is to make the world a better place and roads safer for everyone. In honor of Casey Feldman’s commitment to service, the foundation provides scholarships, animal welfare and service programs, research-based safe driving presentations, and more.
About CMCI
The College of Media, Communication and Information opened in fall 2015 as the first new college on the University of Colorado Boulder campus in 53 years. CMCI was created to match the times we live in—times of revolutionary change in the way people communicate, the tools they use to do it and the impact that change has on society. CMCI offers seven areas of academic specialty: Advertising, Public Relations and Media Design; Communication; Critical Media Practices; Information Science; Intermedia Art, Media Production; Journalism; and Media Studies.
