HONORS

Washington Post reporters Anne Hull and Dana Priest will be awarded the Worth Bingham Prize for their series of reports on conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the lives of veterans who have been treated at the hospital.

Post photographer Jahi Chikwendiu won the White House News Photographers Award for Photographer of the Year and washingtonpost.com received three first-place honors.

Priest and Hull were recognized for "The Other Walter Reed" and "Walter Reed and Beyond."

Through months of interviewing soldiers at the hospital, once considered the military's flagship hospital, Priest and Hull discovered stories of neglected veterans, decaying facilities and indifferent bureaucracy.

"Hobbled, bandaged and often traumatized by war, the soldiers and Marines we met still had the courage and fight in them to try to fix a broken system, and they are still fighting," Hull said.

Less than two weeks after the series ran, Army Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman, commanding general of the Walter Reed center, was relieved of his command. Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey and Army Surgeon General Kevin C. Kiley also left their posts in the wake of the story.

"It's such an honor," Priest said of the award, "but kind of bittersweet because every day you hear from soldiers and their families who are still not getting adequate care."

Priest's and Hull's work was selected from 81 entries to "honor newspaper or magazine investigative reporting of stories of national significance where the public interest is being ill-served." The $10,000 prize will be presented at the National Press Foundation's 25th Annual Awards Dinner on Feb. 28.

Chikwendiu won the WHNPA's Photographer of the Year award for his work on several series, including " 'Continuous War': Cluster Bombs in South Lebanon" and his photographs of D.C. public schools.

For the series on cluster bombs, Chikwendiu spent more than two weeks with Rasha Zayoun, a 17-year-old Lebanese girl who lost a leg to an Israeli-dropped cluster bomb.

"It was an important story for me because of her strength to carry on even though she had been wounded so bad by something that wasn't her conflict; it was Israel and Hezbollah's conflict," Chikwendiu said.

Washingtonpost.com also won three first-place awards from the WHNPA's new media contest.

The photo gallery "Struggle in Mississippi Delta," produced by Whitney Shefte with photography by Carol Guzy, won first place for Best Use of Photography.

The gallery for Chikwendiu's cluster bombs photography, produced by Nancy Donaldson, won first place in the Photography and Audio (narrated) category. The story " Crisis in Darfur Expands," by Travis Fox and Brian Cordyack, won first place in the Multimedia Package category.