Times Wins Press Club Award for Best Coverage

The Greater Los Angeles Press Club award for the best overall coverage in 1986 by a daily newspaper of 100,000 circulation or more was presented Friday night to the Los Angeles Times during the organization’s 29th annual awards ceremony at the Beverly Wilshire.

The Times won six other first-place awards.

Press Club of San Francisco members who judged the competition called The Times “the complete newspaper” and said its coverage of national, world, state and local news is “all of superior quality.”

The Times also won the top prize for the best spot news reporting by print media for its coverage of the collision of an Aeromexico jetliner and a private plane over Cerritos last Aug. 31.

In the broadcast field, radio station KNX won a dozen first-place awards and television station KTLA won seven.

Other top winners Friday night included the Los Angeles Herald Examiner for investigative reporting in the paper’s coverage of problems in the Southern California Rapid Transit District, the Pasadena Star-News for best overall coverage by a daily newspaper of less than 100,000 circulation and the Long Beach Press-Telegram for newswriting on the Cerritos plane collision.

The top print sports reporting award went to Eric Sondheimer, Phil Rosenthal, Stacey Shaw and Lynn Steinberg of the Daily News for their expose of illegal recruiting of high school athletes.

The best print media business story prize was given to Neal Koch of the Herald Examiner for his story on interest rates. The L.A. Weekly was honored for best overall coverage by a weekly or semiweekly newspaper.

Times staff writers Maria L. La Ganga and Nancy Wride won the award for best print media feature for their Los Angeles Times Magazine article last Aug. 3 on a murder-suicide case at a Garden Grove state unemployment office.

Times writer Jay Sharbutt’s behind-the-scenes study of the filming of the movie “Platoon” in the Philippines won the award for the best print media entertainment reporting, and Times writer William Stall’s editorial on the controversial Hetch Hetchy Dam project in Northern California was chosen as the best print editorial.

Times staff writer Anne Roark won the top reporting on media print award for her examination of major changes in publishing and the writing craft. Tom Peckham and Patrick McGinn, editor and assistant editor of The Times’ house organ, Among Ourselves, won the internal publication award.