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Judges Named for NCDJ Contest

Tony Coelho, former U.S. congressman from California and primary author and sponsor of the Americans with Disabilities Act, will serve as one of five judges for the inaugural Katherine Schneider Journalism Award for Excellence in Reporting on Disability, a new national journalism awards program that focuses exclusively on disability coverage.
Coelho will join four other judges who will review entries for the contest and select winners. The other judges are:

  • Leon Dash, Swanlund Chair Professor of Journalism and director of the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dash is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The Washington Post and a member of the NCDJ board.
  • Cyndi Jones, an expert on disability issues who formerly directed The Center for an Accessible Society, funded by the National Institute of Disability and Rehabilitation Research to disseminate information about independent living and disability research to the media.
  • Jennifer Longdon, who was paralyzed in a random shooting incident and now uses a wheelchair. She has been an active speaker on disability issues in the Phoenix metropolitan area and the subject of numerous articles about disability.
  • Tim McGuire, the Frank Russell Chair for the Business of Journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. He is the former editor and senior vice president of the Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper and a member of the NCDJ board.

For brief biographies of contest judges, go to https://ncdj.org/contest/#judges.

The deadline for entering the contest is Aug. 1. For more information, visit https://ncdj.org/contest/.