Miami Herald wins National Headliner Award for probe on the assassination of Haiti president

The Miami Herald has won a prestigious award for its coverage of the assassination of Haiti’s president.

The 89th National Headliner Award winners honoring the best journalism in the United States announced Wednesday that Jacqueline Charles, Jay Weaver, Antonio Maria Delgado and Michael Wilner delivered the best in international news beat coverage or continuing story by an individual or team.

The quartet’s “Made in Miami: The assassination of Haiti’s Jovenel Moise” took first place, topping the Los Angeles Times’ coverage of “The War in Ukraine” by Nabih Bulos. The award came the same week the Miami Herald won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing.

“We’re incredibly proud of the ambitious and groundbreaking work these journalists delivered,” Miami Herald Senior Managing Editor Dana Banker said of the Headliner Award.

“The tragedy of Haiti and its ties to the South Florida community is an incredibly important story, and this team dug deep and aggressively to pull together the most definitive timeline of an assassination plot born here,” Banker said.

The visually detailed interactive graphics for the winning “Made in Miami” were created by a team headed by Sohail Al-Jamea, graphics director for enterprise and investigations for McClatchy, the Miami Herald’s parent company.

READ WINNING ENTRY: Made in Miami. A who’s who in Haiti president’s killing and how they’re interconnected

New details emerge in Haiti president’s slaying as newly charged suspects appear in court

National Headliner judges selected the Miami Herald team’s work for its in-depth probe of who was involved in the killing of Haiti president Jovenel Moise on July 7, 2021.

“’Made in “Miami,’ a riveting narrative of a kidnapping that led to murder, combined shoe-leather reporting in Haiti with probes of police reports, phone records and indictments. The chief reporter, Jacqueline Charles, described as ‘a road map to the truth,’ lays out how the kidnapping came about, how it morphed into a killing, and the aftermath that led to arrests for murder,” National Headliner judges said.

“The details show a multi-layered, multi-national whodunit that ends with this frightening summation: ‘There is nothing to guarantee that a presidential assassination in Haiti cannot happen again.’”

Other National Headliner honorees based in Miami included:

▪ Sports news writing by an individual or a team: “NFL Coaching Carousel: How Race Plays a Role” by the Miami Herald’s Sarah Blaskey, Nicholas Nehamas and Rosmery Izaguirre. The Herald team, with contributions by Herald researcher Monika Leal, took second place in sports reporting for their data-driven look at racial disparities in NFL coaching circles, judges said.

“We’re equally proud of the lightning fast work our team did on racial disparities in NFL hiring, pulling together a revelatory look at the issue within days of Brian Flores’ blockbuster lawsuit,” Banker said.

▪ Radio stations’ health/science/pandemic story: “Florida’s severe child psychiatrist shortage keeps one provider in Miami-Dade up at night” took first place by Verónica Zaragovia of WLRN News.

▪ Best in Show radios’ category: The winners were Gerard Albert III, Kate Payne and Christine DiMattei of WLRN News in Miami. Their story titled “The Death-Penalty Trial and Verdict of the Parkland School Shooter” won first place in the breaking news or continuing coverage of a single news event category.

The National Headliner Awards were founded in 1934 by the Press Club of Atlantic City. The annual contest is one of the oldest and largest in the country that recognizes journalistic merit in the communications industry.