Monitor staffer wins prestigious photojournalism award

McALLEN — The National Press Photographers Association has honored Monitor chief photographer Nathan Lambrecht with one of the world's highest awards for photojournalism. (Click here to see Nathan Lambrecht's award-winning piece)

Lambrecht, who in 2007 was named Star Photographer of the Year for the state of Texas by The Headliners Foundation, has received this year's award for the overall best audio slideshow in the NPPA's Best of Photojournalism 2009 competition.

Lambrecht won the award for his audio slideshow titled "Weslaco Bullriders - Life Lessons Learned Over 8 Seconds," which is published on The Monitor's website, www.themonitor.com. The slideshow provides an in-depth, inside look at a rodeo training program available to students at Weslaco High School. In winning the award, Lambrecht's work beat out entries from such papers as The New York Times and The Washington Post.

"We are extremely pleased, but not totally surprised that Nathan won this award from NPPA," said Steve Fagan, editor of The Monitor and executive editor of Valley Freedom Newspapers. "Nathan keeps proving time and time again that he is clearly among the nation's best news photographers, and we are very lucky to have him at The Monitor to help us chronicle life in the Rio Grande Valley."

This is Lambrecht's second major recognition in NPPA's Best of Photojournalism competition. In 2006, he won first place in the individual sports action category for his photo of a local boxing match at Dodge Arena.

The annual NPPA competition, which is open to news photographers from all over the world, has multiple categories covering still, video and multimedia photography. This year, nearly 3,700 photojournalists from 147 nations submitted more than 53,000 entries for the competition.

There were five audio slideshow categories: News, Features, Sports, Natural Disaster and The Road to Office Audio Slideshow, which was for anything dealing with the election. Audio slideshow categories were broken up into three circulation size classifications: independent Web sites, for nontraditional news outlets; Web sites with fewer than 2.5 million unique page views a month, which covered the majority of publications; and Web sites with more than 2.5 million unique page views a month, which included the largest metro papers in the world.

On its way to winning the overall best audio slideshow, Lambrecht's entry also won first place in the sports audio slideshow category for Web sites with fewer than 2.5 million unique page views a month.

Commenting on Lambrecht's entry, competition judge Michelle Maltais, editorial broadcast manager for the Los Angeles Times, said, "The images were striking and the audio beautifully edited to create a compelling multimedia story."

Lambrecht, who is from San Antonio, graduated in 2002 from the University of Texas at Austin with a bachelor's degree in journalism. He completed two internships for newspapers in the Midwest and worked one and a half years as a staff photographer in West Texas. In 2004 he joined the photo staff of The Monitor and La Frontera, The Monitor's Spanish-language sister newspaper. In September 2007 Lambrecht became the chief photographer for The Monitor.