Washington, D.C. - David Bradley, chairman of Atlantic Media Company, announced tonight that Seattle Times reporters Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry are this year's recipients of the Michael Kelly Award for their series exposing the criminal histories of members of a Rose Bowl-winning University of Washington football team.

The $25,000 award is given annually to a journalist whose work exemplifies a quality that animated Michael Kelly's own career: the fearless pursuit and expression of truth. Kelly, who was the editor of two Atlantic Media publications, The Atlantic and National Journal, was killed while covering the war in Iraq in 2003.

In a statement, the award judges said Armstrong and Perry displayed "the commitment to truth that will alienate readers, risk advertising accounts, and jeopardize a newspaper's standing during already precarious times." The panel also noted that their "Victory and Ruins" series "showed how it wasn't only the athletic department and university administrators who looked the other way at the players' run-ins with the law but also local police, prosecutors, judges, and influential alumni."

The judges also recognized four journalists from three other organizations as finalists: Barry Bearak and Celia Dugger of The New York Times, Richard Behar of Fast Company and Peter Godwin of Vanity Fair.

The winners and finalists were honored at a dinner tonight in Washington at Atlantic Media Company headquarters.

The finalists were selected from a total of 50 entries from journalists at U.S.-based newspapers and magazines. The award is for work published in 2008.

A panel of five journalists served as judges for this year's award: Carl Cannon, a contributing editor for National Journal; Charles Green, editor of National Journal; Kelly Kennedy, a staff writer at Army Times and a Michael Kelly Award finalist last year; Cullen Murphy, editor-at-large for Vanity Fair; and freelance writer Loretta Tofani, last year's winner of the Michael Kelly Award. Murphy, former managing editor of The Atlantic, recused himself from deliberations and voting regarding the Vanity Fair entry.

To read this year's entries, and for additional information about the Michael Kelly Award, visit www.kellyaward.com

Atlantic Media Company is a Washington, D.C.-based publishing company whose flagship properties include The Atlantic, National Journal, and Government Executive.

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WINNERS
Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry
The Seattle Times

Courage can take many forms. There's physical courage - the willingness of journalists to put themselves in harm's way to keep the public informed. There's also moral courage - the commitment to truth that will alienate readers, risk advertising accounts, and jeopardize a newspaper's standing during already precarious times. Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry of The Seattle Times displayed such courage in their four-part series "Victory and Ruins," which exposed a community's blind embrace of a Rose Bowl-winning University of Washington football team that coddled two dozen players who were arrested while at the university for charges including rape, robbery, and assault. Armstrong and Perry showed how it wasn't only the athletic department and university administrators who looked the other way but also local police, prosecutors, judges, and influential alumni. As Seattle Times investigations editor James Neff wrote: "Few things ignite as much passion as football. And we knew we were lighting a fuse."

Armstrong, 46, is an investigative reporter at The Seattle Times. He previously worked at the Chicago Tribune, where he co-wrote a five-part series on capital punishment that helped prompt the Illinois governor to suspend executions and then empty Death Row. Armstrong has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and the McGraw Professor of Writing at Princeton. He has twice won the George Polk Award and is a four-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. After false starts in law school and the Peace Corps, Armstrong's first job was at a small Colorado paper, where his beat was "sports and courts." He later worked at papers in Idaho, California, Virginia, New York and Alaska. Armstrong is married to Ramona Hattendorf. They have two children, Emmett and Meghan.

Perry has covered the higher-education beat at The Seattle Times for the past three years. He is a native of New Zealand, where he grew up in a family steeped in newspaper tradition - his late grandfather was a renowned cricket writer who covered the sport for 60 years. Perry began his career at The New Zealand Herald in 1998 and moved to Seattle with his American wife Amy in 2000. He has worked for the Times since 2002. Perry has won a George Polk Award and a national beat-reporting award from the Education Writers Association. He is currently working with Ken Armstrong on a book based on the "Victory and Ruins" series. Perry and his wife have two children, Henry and Lillie.

FINALISTS
Barry Bearak and Celia Dugger
The New York Times

Lawlessness reigned in Zimbabwe as the government of Robert Mugabe terrorized residents last year in a desperate, and ultimately successful, attempt to stay in power after disputed elections in March. New York Times reporters (and husband and wife) Barry Bearak and Celia Dugger chronicled Zimbabwe's disintegration at great personal risk. Bearak was imprisoned by authorities in Zimbabwe for several days for the crime of "committing journalism." As one of Bearak's captors told him, "You've been gathering, processing and disseminating the news." After Bearak's release, he was spirited out of the country and unable to return because he was too well known. But Dugger decided to risk her own arrest and imprisonment by traveling to Zimbabwe to continuing reporting the story. Their dozens of gripping and first-hand accounts ensured that the government's campaign of violence and intimidation did not go unnoticed.

Bearak became co-bureau chief of the Johannesburg bureau of The New York Times in January 2008. Bearak joined the Times in 1997. He was the newspaper's co-bureau chief in South Asia from 1998 until 2002. He then joined the Magazine as a staff writer. Before coming to the Times, Bearak worked for The Los Angeles Times as a roving national correspondent from 1982 until 1997. He was a reporter on the metro staff of The Miami Herald from 1976 until 1982. Bearak was the co-recipient, along with his wife Celia Dugger, of the 2009 George Polk Foreign Reporting Award for coverage of the violence in Zimbabwe surrounding the disputed re-election of the authoritarian president. He won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for his work in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He won the 2001 George Polk Award for the same body of work. In 1987, Bearak was a Pulitzer finalist in the category of feature writing.

Dugger became co-bureau chief of the Johannesburg bureau of The New York Times in January 2008. Previously, Dugger was a foreign correspondent, based in New York and assigned to cover global poverty issues. She was an Edward R. Murrow Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations from 2002 to 2003. Dugger was a co-chief of the New Delhi bureau from August 1998 to July 2002, after joining The Times as a metropolitan news reporter in March 1991. Before that, she was a reporter for The Miami Herald from 1984 and was a reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution from 1980 to 1984. She interned at The Washington Post in 1979 and 1980. Born in Austin, Tex., on July 3, 1958, Dugger received a B.A. degree in history, magna cum laude, from Harvard College in 1980. In 2007, Dugger was the co-recipient, along with Donald McNeil, of an Overseas Press Club Award and the grand prize from the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards. She also won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for international reporting in 2005. Dugger is married to Barry Bearak, who was co-bureau chief with her in India and is now co-bureau chief with her in Johannesburg. They have two children, Max and Sam.

Richard Behar
Business Reporter, Fast Company

In "China Storms Africa," investigative reporter Richard Behar reveals China's aggressive quest for natural resources in sub-Sahara Africa. "This commercial invasion," Behar writes, "is without question the most important development in the sub-Sahara since the end of the Cold War." It is, he reports, "one of the most bare-knuckled resource grabs the world has ever seen." To report the story for Fast Company, Behar traveled throughout Africa to gather the evidence of China's ambitions, which threaten to wipe out a decade's worth of efforts to improve African human rights and government transparency. But in the end, Behar writes, it's not just about China and Africa. "We buy China's junk, they buy our bonds, our real estate, even our corporations; they expand into Africa with our money, enabling them to grow and sell us more junk. It's a spider web, a matrix - and how it spins out is as scary as it is unclear."

Behar has garnered more than 20 journalism awards over a career spanning 25 years. He was called "one of the most dogged of our watchdogs" by the late Jack Anderson - a founding father of modern investigative reporting. From 1982 to 2004, Behar worked on the staffs of Forbes, Time and Fortune magazines. He has also done assignments for BBC, CNN, Fast Company, FoxNews.com and PBS. In 2005, Behar launched Project Klebnikov, a global media alliance committed to shedding light on the Moscow murder of Forbes editor Paul Klebnikov and to furthering the investigative work that Klebnikov began. In December of 2008, Behar was commissioned by Random House to write a book about the Bernard Madoff scandal. Major awards include the Daniel Pearl, Loeb, Polk, National Magazine, Overseas Press Club and Worth Bingham, among others. Behar was included among the 100 top business journalists of the 20th century by The Journalist and Financial Reporter, and was named Business Journalist of the Year in London in 2001. He also received the rarely-bestowed Conscience-in-Media Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors, for a Time cover story on the Church of Scientology.

Peter Godwin
Foreign Correspondent, Vanity Fair

Peter Godwin saw Zimbabwe as few other journalists could. He grew up and was educated in Zimbabwe, served as a conscript, and maintains a network of friends and associates in the country. After President Robert Mugabe banned Western journalists from Zimbabwe, Godwin was able to spend more than six weeks there at a particularly horrific time, when Mugabe was terrorizing citizens in the run-up to elections. Godwin's brave and moving piece in Vanity Fair describes a social collapse and brutal intimidation so extreme that people in Zimbabwe refer to the prevailing state of mind there simply as "the Fear." But, as Godwin shows, the spirit of resistance has not been entirely extinguished. In one scene in his story, a church congregation crowds around Godwin when the police attempt to seize him, quietly hiding his notebooks under their clothing so that there will be no evidence that he is a journalist.

Godwin, 51, grew up in Africa. He studied law at Cambridge University, and international relations at Oxford. He is an award winning foreign correspondent, author, documentary-maker and screenwriter. After practicing human rights law in Zimbabwe, he became a foreign and war correspondent, and has reported from over 60 countries, including wars in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Somalia, Congo, Ivory Coast, Sudan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Kashmir and the last years of apartheid South Africa. He served as East European correspondent and Diplomatic correspondent for the London Sunday Times, and chief correspondent for BBC television's flagship foreign affairs program, Assignment (now Correspondent), making documentaries from such places as Cuba, Panama, Indonesia, Pakistan, Spain, Northern Ireland, the Philippines, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, the Baltics and the Balkans as it descended into war. His film, "The Industry of Death," about the sex trade in Thailand, won the gold medal for investigative film at the New York Film Festival.

He also wrote and co-presented a three part series, 'Africa Unmasked,' for Britain's Channel Four. He has written for a wide array of magazines and newspapers including Vanity Fair, National Geographic, The New York Times magazine, Time, Newsweek, the Observer (London) and the Guardian (London). He is the author of five non fiction books: 'Rhodesians Never Die' - The Impact of war and Political Change on White Rhodesia c.1970 - 1980 (with Ian Hancock), Wild at Heart: Man and Beast in Southern Africa (with photos by Chris Johns and foreword by Nelson Mandela), The Three of Us - a New Life in New York (with Joanna Coles) and Mukiwa, for which he received the George Orwell prize and the Esquire-Apple-Waterstones award. His latest book is When a Crocodile Eats the Sun - a Memoir of Africa.

He has taught writing at the New School, Princeton and Sarah Lawrence College.