Two alums at WSLS share Peabody award

Two recent Washington and Lee journalism alumni are among the staff at Channel 10 in Roanoke who won a prestigious Peabody Award for the station's coverage of the April 16, 2007 tragedy at Virginia Tech.

Juliet Bickford ’00 was daytime anchor and Ryan Hale ’06 was working as a producer on the  team that reported the story when Seung-Hui Cho shot 32 people to death before committing suicide.

"That was the toughest story to cover,” Bickford recalled. “It was so close to home. That was our market. Campus was only 45 minutes away. I felt like it was so important to try to get some sort of true image out there of who the students were. We had to relay this awful news to the public."

The Peabody is the oldest and is considered the most prestigious award in broadcast journalism. It is often equated with the Pulitzer Prize in print journalism. As one of only four local stations to receive this year’s award, WSLS was recognized for "demonstrated knowledge of their community, mastery of their journalistic craft and remarkable, much-needed calm" in covering the worst mass shooting in United States history.

“We are enormously proud of Juliet and Ryan,” said Journalism Department Head Brian Richardson.  “As the award citation noted, they provided exhaustive, calm, contextualized information under enormous emotional stress. That kind of service to our audiences is why we choose to pursue this difficult, heartbreaking, rewarding, wonderful calling.” 

The Peabody is named after businessman and philanthropist George Foster Peabody, who provided the initial grant to endow the awards at the University of Georgia. The awards were established in 1941 for radio. Television awards were introduced seven years later, and in the 1990s material on the World Wide Web began to be recognized.
NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams will preside at the 67th annual Peabody Awards ceremony June 16 in New York City.