The national Society for Professional Journalists has bestowed top honors to a team of Miami Herald and WLRN journalists for their investigation into Brightline’s staggering fatality record.
The team won for non-deadline reporting in the society’s Sigma Delta Chi Awards, with judges calling the project “one of the most dramatically and graphically told stories we’ve read in a long time” and noting how its exhaustive reporting “translated into compelling stories that matter.”
The “Killer Train” investigation revealed that Brightline — a privately operated, higher-speed train promoted as a model for the future of American rail — has become the deadliest major passenger train in the United States. Since 2017, more than 200 people have been killed by Brightline trains. That’s an average of one death every 13 days of service…