Seattle Reporter Wins National Edward R. Murrow Award

Posted June 17, 2010

A veteran KOMO-4 television journalist and Seattle AFTRA member has won one of the nation’s premier broadcast news awards.

           

Eric Johnson, sports director and 5 p.m. news anchor for the Seattle ABC affiliate earned the 2010 Edward R. Murrow National Award for writing. The honor is one of 89 national awards given by the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTNDA) to honor the country’s most outstanding news, sports and feature coverage.

It’s Johnson’s second national Murrow, a rarity in the intensely competitive world of broadcast journalism. He won the 2007 national Murrow for the year’s top feature story. He’s also won more than two dozen regional Emmy awards.

 

“This is a significant honor for Eric,” said Seattle local president Steve Krueger, himself an RTNDA member and former regional Murrow award-winner in radio sports reporting. “Very few journalists win a national Murrow, let alone two in a career. It’s a tribute to the kind of professionalism and talent Eric brings to the job every day.”

 

Johnson’s 2010 entry included three unique expressions of broadcast writing. The first was his heart-wrenching four-minute story on the massive Tacoma funeral of four Lakewood police officers who were murdered in the line of duty.

 

His second entry was a poignant feature on Ken Griffey Jr.'s final game of the 2009 season, which included his final hit of the year – which many fans assumed might be the last of his Hall of Fame career – and the post-game procession in which teammates carried Junior and fellow Seattle Mariner Ichiro Suzuki around the field on their shoulders.

           

The final entry was one of the “Eric’s Little Heroes” humorous features, a series that he pioneered in 1993.

 

This is the latest in a string of major awards that local AFTRA broadcasters have swept up so far this year. Recently, members from four stations took home 13 regional Murrow awards, and a KPLU reporter won an international reporting award from a German journalism organization.

           

Johnson was raised in Spokane and later majored in broadcasting at the Edward R. Murrow School of Communications at Washington State University. Since joining KOMO, he’s covered every one of Seattle’s major sports milestones, including the Mariners magical 1995 season, the 1996 Sonics run toward the NBA title and the Seahawks first and only appearance in the Super Bowl. Johnson is married and has two children.
           

He’ll receive his award at a gala ceremony Oct. 11 in New York City.

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