Times staff among RFK award winners

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John F. Solomon, executive editor of The Washington Times, and Times staff photographer Mary F. Calvert are among the winners of this year's prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards.

Established in 1968 by a group of reporters covering Robert Kennedy's presidential election, the annual competition highlights work seen in print and on television that brings to light social injustice, especially affecting the disadvantaged as they face fallible courts and government institutions.

Mr. Solomon, who began his job as The Times' top editor in January, shared award honors with CBS' "60 Minutes" for the top prize in the category of Domestic Television. Mr. Solomon was working at the time for The Washington Post in a joint reporting enterprise with the staff of "60 Minutes" to show how faulty science in the FBI's laboratory had caused several men to be unfairly tried and imprisoned.

Although the award was presented in a television category, RFK Memorial Foundation spokeswoman Edda Santiago said the judges went out of their way to include Mr. Solomon because he had contributed so much to the report, which appeared as a series in The Post in November titled "Evidence of Injustice."

"60 Minutes" correspondent Steve Kroft reported on the investigation on the show on Nov. 18.

The investigation showed that the FBI crime lab continued to use a technique of analyzing the chemical composition of lead in bullets for a year afer it was shown to be unreliable and potentially misleading. Even after halting use of the technique, the FBI failed to notify several men who had been convicted on the basis of it.

Ms. Calvert won for photos taken during a trip to India to cover the widespread practice of selectively aborting female fetuses. The material, titled "Lost Daughters," appeared in The Times last spring.

In the past two years, Ms. Calvert also has traveled on assignment to Israel, the Palestinian Territories and Ethiopia. She won a 2007 portfolio award in the Photograph of the Year category sponsored by the White House News Photographers Association and was a Pulitzer finalist last year.

"It's a thrill to be awarded this prize," she said after receiving a call from Ethel Kennedy, widow of Robert Kennedy. "I'm very impressed by the organization. They have a long record of meaningful work, and winning this award makes me feel part of that."

Mr. Solomon said: "At the advent of the 21st century, many news media have been trying cross-platform experiments to engage consumers in new ways with varying results. This is one that worked.

"At every step of the way, the '60 Minutes' team of Steve Kroft, Ira Rosen and Sumi Aggarwal were reporting right alongside me and The Washington Post team. We traveled together, interviewed together and shared every last page of our notebooks together.

"And the resulting collaboration helped to powerfully expose an injustice in the court system and prompt the FBI to take the necessary corrective actions."

Mr. Rosen, producer of the "60 Minutes" program, called the Kennedy award "one of the greatest awards to win, basically because of what you are being recognized for. Judges say your work fulfilled the values of what Robert Kennedy thought was important and, as a journalist, I can't think of better praise."

Mr. Solomon had been working on the report for some time before presenting it to "60 Minutes," Mr. Kroft said.

"The subject matter [the judges] concentrate on is often a forgotten issue in journalism right now. I think that it is a real honor," he said.

The contest is one of few in the field in which winners are determined solely by their peers. The awards consist of $1,000 cash and a sculpture of Robert Kennedy, which will be presented in a formal ceremony at the Newseum on May 27.