Vancouver journalist wins award

David Beers, the founder of The Tyee (www.thetyee.com), has won the 2011 Edward R. Murrow Award for best news website.
The Radio and Television News Directors Association gives out this award to the best news organizations in North Ameria.
The Tyee is the only Canadian news organization to be honoured for the National (North America-wide) category this year.
Previous winners including www.washingtonpost.com, www.texastribune.org and the Washington DC-based Center for Public Integrity.
The Tyee was also runner up for this year’s Canadian Journalism Foundation Excellence in Journalism Award.
This is the second time in three years that The Tyee has won the Murrow Award, and it’s the only Canadian news website to have ever received a North America-wide Murrow prize.  Beers founded The Tyee in 2003 and is editor in chief. In 2011 The Tyee published a series of in-depth news reports that included a 15-part series on the War Over Oil Sands reported from Washington D.C., exposing Canada’s alliance with oil firms lobbying against climate change legislation, and a 17-part multi-media series Growing Local Bounty on what it takes to build a strong local food economy.
Beers has been with the UBC School of Journalism since 2002.  He teaches long form magazine writing and solutions-based journalism, and he mentors many of the School’s students during internships at The Tyee.