The NPF judges said: “The McClatchy project drew attention to the very active issue of crude oil transport by trains. The user-friendly, data-driven interactive dramatically illustrates the counties that these trains rumble through each day, occasionally with devastating impact. This work fulfills that highest of journalistic callings: to comfort the afflicted, in this case the public and the workers at risk.”

Curtis Tate is a national correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers, based in its Washington Bureau. He covers transportation and transportation safety, and his signature reporting efforts have focused on crude by rail and the federal highway trust fund.

Before joining McClatchy in 2008, Curtis worked at the Wall Street Journal as a copy and news editor. Curtis was based in South Brunswick, N.J., but the paper rarely kept him there, sending him to work in New York, Washington, Brussels and Hong Kong. Curtis began his newspaper career in 2003 as a Dow Jones News Fund copy editing intern at the Indianapolis Star. He graduated from the University of Kentucky in 2002 with a degree in journalism and wrote for its school paper, the Kentucky Kernel.