Project honored by black journalism association

The Chauncey Bailey Project has received the Best Practices Award from the National Association of Black Journalists.

The project is a consortium of Bay Area news organizations that joined together to finish the work of Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey, who was shot to death Aug. 2, 2007, while working on a story about the financial troubles of Your Black Muslim Bakery in Oakland. The Bay Area News Group — East Bay, publisher of this newspaper, is a project member.

“It is horrendous when a journalist is killed for reporting on a story that needs to be told,” said Barbara Ciara, president of the association. “This is really something that deserves to be honored, so it was an easy decision.”

The award, expected to be announced Saturday at an awards dinner in Chicago, marks the second national journalism award the project has received this year. At a convention in Miami in June, Investigative Reporters and Editors bestowed the group with its Tom Renner Award for crime reporting.