The Texas Newsroom has won a national Gracie Award for its original podcast, Sugar Land. The award is for Investigative Feature, in the category of Radio — Nationally Syndicated Non-Commercial.
In 2018, construction crews building a new school in Sugar Land, Texas discovered a long-forgotten cemetery containing 95 graves. Through investigative reporting, Sugar Land sets out to unearth and share the story of those 95 people — and also, the people trying to control them for over a century.
Sugar Land is a production of The Texas Newsroom — a public radio journalism collaborative that includes NPR, Houston Public Media, Texas Public Radio in San Antonio, KUT in Austin and KERA in North Texas. Texas Public Radio has also won a local Gracie Award for Planes, Trains and Automobiles, a reporting series about Texans traveling to other states for reproductive health care.
The Gracie Awards recognize exemplary programming created by women, for women and about women in all facets of media and entertainment. Sugar Land was co-hosted by Brittney Martin and Naomi Reed, and was edited by Rachel Osier Lindley of KERA.
Sugar Land was completed with the support of a grant from Columbia University's Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights, with funding provided by Arnold Ventures. The podcast also received a grant from the Convict Leasing and Labor Project. The Texas Newsroom received support for Sugar Land from FRONTLINE’s Local Journalism Initiative, which is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Copyright 2024 KERA. To see more, visit KERA.
