OXFORD, Miss. –
When Mississippi Public Broadcasting reporter Sandra Knispel was told
one Thursday evening that her job, like a growing number of newsroom
positions in recent years, had fallen victim to budget cuts, she didn’t
expect to win a national Edward R. Murrow Award the very next day.
“It
was a rough day,” said Knispel, who received her master’s degree in
journalism from the University of Mississippi in 2003, and is the first
Ole Miss journalism graduate to win such an award.
Besides her
own work that Friday, she was filing freelance reports with National
Public Radio on the sentencing of former Mississippi trial lawyer
Richard Scruggs. Later on, her purse and keys were stolen. And, after
what was supposed to be her last day on the job, she still had to go
home and take care of her 4-year-old twins.
But when her news director called that evening to inform her she had won an Edward R. Murrow Award for Outstanding Achievement in Network Radio News in the hard news category, you can probably guess her response.
“Can I have my job back?” she asked.
She got it, and she flies to New York City for an Oct. 13 award ceremony.
In a news release earlier this month, Mississippi Public Broadcasting’s Executive Director Marie Antoon compared the organization’s accomplishment to “David facing seven Goliaths and coming out on top.”
Other winners in the national radio category were ABC News, CBS News, NPR and XM Satellite Radio. The competition received nearly 3,500 entries and awarded 77 honors. Knispel was one of two MPB reporters to win a Murrow award that day.
Knispel, a native of Germany who has lived in five countries, received the award for her story, “Emmet Till Apology.” For the piece, she dove into the community of Sumner, a small town in northwestern Mississippi where local leaders issued a formal apology last year for the community’s role in the 1955 murder of a black teenager.
An all-white jury had met for only 67 minutes and acquitted both men charged with the crime. Though many key players in the gruesome murder more than a half-century ago are dead and not enough evidence remains to investigate the living, the community apologized not only for the trial but also for the atmosphere that tolerated the hate crime, she said.
“Justice, they (the Till family) can’t get anymore,” Knispel said. “The only way the family could get an approximation of justice was through an apology by the community saying, ‘We failed your family, we failed blacks in Mississippi.'”
Because the community issued a formal apology, tracking down the witnesses and family members was the easy part. They were all invited. And, instead of taking a standard approach to covering the event, Knispel toured Tallahatchie County with the surviving family of Emmet Till to visit the setting of the Chicago native’s brief time in Mississippi.
“I thought being a white reporter they would be slightly standoffish with me,” she said. “Time worked in my favor, though. It had been so long ago that at this point family members were happy to talk. They wanted the community to know they appreciated the apology. They wanted people to know they wouldn’t forget, and they will continue their struggle in trying to pass legislation to open cold cases.”
Knispel attributes her love of the news business to her mother, who, fearing her daughter would starve pursuing a career as an actress, dropped her off at a regional German newspaper at the age of 16.
“I didn’t think she was going to pack me in the car and say, ‘You are going to walk in now and ask for an internship,'” Knispel said. “She kicked me out of the car and said, ‘Don’t come back until you’ve been in there.'”
Knowing the name of only one writer at the paper, Knispel managed to talk her way past a security guard and into the newsroom. When she presented herself to the writer, the reporter said “Well, that’s a good start.”
She got the internship, and her career in journalism began. She later made the jump into television news in the mid-1990s after once again conning her way into the newsroom. She posed as a graduate student by using her former university’s (The Universite de Poiters in France) letterhead to request an internship for school credit. TV stations in her area had no money to pay her, and employment laws required interns to receive at least school credit for their work. At the end of her internship, she was the only intern hired for a full-time position.
Before coming to Mississippi with her husband Gregory Heyworth, UM associate professor of English, she worked for Bloomberg News, first as a multimedia producer in Princeton, N.J., and later as a senior anchor for Bloomberg Television in London.
“I thought jeez, what am I doing?” she said. “I’m going from a high-flying career as an anchor in London to nothing in Oxford, Mississippi. But it turned out to be a natural lull for me to have a baby.”
As a part-time reporter and full-time mother of twins (a boy and a girl), Knispel said her biggest challenge is finding time to balance her professional and personal lives. Being a mother and a reporter sometimes requires late nights, long hours and surprises on both fronts.
“All these women who tell you that you can have it all either haven’t tried it or are lying through their teeth,” she said. “Something has to give, and you give it on a regular basis.”
The Murrow awards, given annually since 1971 by the Radio-Television News Directors Association for excellence in electronic journalism, are named for the legendary pioneer of the early days of broadcast journalism.