South Dakota News Watch won a first-place award and three finalist citations in the annual Great Plains Journalism Awards for work produced in 2020. News Watch competed against newspapers of all sizes in an eight-state region that includes the Dakotas, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma.
Content Director Bart Pfankuch and former reporter Nick Lowrey won a first-place award in Business Reporting for two stories on the coronavirus outbreaks at U.S. meatpacking plants, including at the Smithfield Foods plant in Sioux Falls. One article was about lax regulation at meatpacking plants that allowed the virus to spread freely, and the other was the follow-up article on the reissued, watered-down CDC report on the Smithfield outbreak. News Watch beat out finalist entries from the Omaha World Herald and Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in that category.