« A Call From the Prosecutor and the FBI Agent who have NOT YET Indicted Ratner although they have Evidence in Hand. | Main | “We can’t offer any compensation…” »
January 29, 2010
OCA Announces Two Crystal Eagle Award Recipients for 2010
The Eminent Domain Law Blog
The Eagle has landed — in the hands of (award-winning) journalist Norman Oder.
Owners' Counsel of America (OCA) will honor two journalists in 2010 with the Crystal Eagle Award for their remarkable journalism and unwavering effort to be critical and objective, specifically with respect to their investigative reportage and balanced analysis regarding the government’s use of eminent domain.
...Norman Oder, freelance journalist and creator of the watchdog blog Atlantic Yards Report, and Robbie Whelan, Business/Real Estate Reporter for The Daily Record (Baltimore, Maryland) and freelance writer/blogger will each be honored with the Crystal Eagle Award at OCA’s tenth annual meeting on February 6, 2010.
...Oder’s work involves regular critiques of media coverage, long-form reporting of events like public hearings and court arguments, and detailed analyses of documents like legal papers and those submitted for the state’s environmental process. He regularly gleans scoops by filing Freedom of Information Law requests and bridges the gap between legal formality and ground-level reality by showing how, for example, the state’s claims of blight in and around the project sight are suspect.
In writing hundreds of thousands of words a year over more than four years, he offers a longitudinal view of an enormously contested project, one that Kent Barwick, former president of the Municipal Art Society, suggested might be “this generation’s Penn Station,”—in that, just as the demolition of the station galvanized the historic preservation movement in the 1960s, so too the enormously questionable process behind Atlantic Yards might prompt revision of the way the city and New York state, which is considered to the most condemnor-friendly eminent domain laws in the nation, go about development and eminent domain.
NoLandGrab: Congratulations, Norman. Without you, we wouldn't have half as many news items to post.
Posted by eric at January 29, 2010 3:11 PM