The awards were announced on June 29, 2007 by the Hawaii chapter of SPJ. Chang and Lapidus won first place in the Radio category of General News/Enterprise Reporting. The feature story focuses on the growing popularity of Korean soap operas among Hawaiians and Asian Americans on the U.S. mainland.
Commenting on the feature, the judges said they "enjoyed the analysis of the issues addressed in the dramas and the cultural and sociological implications of what we see in them."
Faith Lapidus edits and produces freelance multimedia features for VOA. Over the past year she has edited over 250 stories by VOA stringers around the country.
The Society of Professional Journalists is a non-profit organization founded to protect the rights of journalists. It has over 9,000 members nationwide including broadcast, print, and online journalists, journalism educators and students.
The Voice of America, which first went on the air in 1942, is a multimedia international broadcasting service funded by the U.S. government through the Broadcasting Board of Governors. VOA broadcasts more than 1,000 hours of news, information, educational, and cultural programming every week to an estimated worldwide audience of more than 115 million people. Programs are produced in 45 languages.
For more information, call the Office of Public Affairs at (202) 203-4959, or e-mail publicaffairs@voa.gov.