A reporter for The Hunts Point Express has won a prestigious award for a story about a Pentecostal pastor’s Longwood food pantry.
Fausto Giovanny Pinto won the Murray Kempton Award, honoring the contributions of outstanding undergraduate student journalists at the City University of New York for the article “Small Longwood church feeds the hungry,” which, said the judges, “captures the essence of enterprise reporting with a heartfelt look at the Word of Life Christian Fellowship International Church in the South Bronx.”
The story, they said, “ably portrays the struggle of a pastor and his wife to care for needy area residents, not only with food, but also with understanding and compassion.”
The awards, which carry a $500 prize, are named for the Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper columnist Murray Kempton, who died in 1997 after a career in New York journalism that spanned a half-century.
The contest was judged by Elaine Rivera, a lecturer in journalism at Lehman College, Stephanie Saul, a reporter at The New York Times and Neill S. Rosenfeld, the curator of the Kempton Awards.
“Each of us had the privilege of working with Murray Kempton,” the three said in a statement, “and we feel confident that he would have been proud to lend his name to this competition and to these three winners.”
A version of this story appeared in the January 2011 issue of The Hunts Point Express.