The Register's Iowa Caucus series wins prestigious National Headliner Award

The Des Moines Register has won a prestigious National Headliner Award, which “honors the best in journalism.”

“Death of the Iowa Democratic Caucus” — the Register’s three-part series tracing how the Democratic Party’s beloved Iowa Caucuses mushroomed from a well-intentioned accident into a spectacle and finally a fiasco — won third place in the news series category.

Chief Politics Reporter Brianne Pfannenstiel and Iowa Columnist Courtney Crowder used extensive interviews with key players and tales from the heart of the campaign trail to take readers behind the scenes of the most important moments of caucus history and inside the rooms and decisions that led to the 2020 caucuses' spectacular failure.

"The Iowa Caucuses are such an important part of this state's history for the past half-century," said Des Moines Register Executive Editor Carol Hunter. "Brianne and Courtney did a magnificent job of examining the Democratic caucuses' impact on the course of the state and nation and what led to their demise. I'm proud that such a prominent national contest has recognized the caliber of this work."

Given by the Press Club of Atlantic City, the Headliner Awards are “one of the oldest and largest annual contests in the country recognizing journalistic merit.”

First and second place in the news series category went to the Oregonian, of Portland, Oregon, for a series that wrestled with the newspaper's racist past and for another that followed the triumphs and tragedies of a local alternative high school.

The Register’s caucus series also took home second place in the series category of the annual Society for Features Journalism contest, which honors excellence in storytelling and narrative writing. In addition, the series was honored as the best local reporting of the year by Gannett, the Register's parent company.

Both Crowder and Pfannenstiel have been on staff for eight years. Crowder, who hails from the suburbs of Chicago, specializes in narrative writing ― skills she recently used in a different medium as the co-director and producer of “SHIFT: The RAGBRAI Documentary.”

Pfannenstiel, a native of Lawrence, Kansas, is covering her third caucus cycle and was the co-moderator, along with Wolf Blitzer and Abby Phillip, of the seventh Democratic debate in 2020.

Read the series:

• PART ONE: The death of the Iowa Democratic caucus: How 50 years of jury-rigging doomed an American tradition

• PART TWO: ‘Political guerrilla warfare’: The Iowa caucus legend grows as Jimmy Carter cements a presidential playbook

• PART THREE: ‘How can anyone trust you?’: The Iowa Democratic caucus collapses in a spectacular crash

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Des Moines Register wins National Headliner Award for caucus series