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Winners of the 2025 Virginias Associated Press Broadcasters Awards were announced March 28 at an Awards Luncheon and Annual Membership Meeting at Hotel Madison & Shenandoah Conference Center in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
Organizers said 37 news organizations in Virginia and West Virginia submitted 598 entries to the contest. The awards featured news and sports stories from 2025.
Kurt Williams, a longtime anchor at WTKR-TV in Norfolk, Virginia, was honored with the Associated Press Robert Gallimore Distinguished Service Award. The Associated Press news release said Williams began his career in radio while a student at Georgia State University, later worked at WXIA-TV and WDEF-TV, and joined WTKR in 1987.
The West Virginia Lifetime Achievement Award went to Paul Swann. The release said Swann began his radio broadcasting career 37 years ago at WMUL-FM, the campus station of Marshall University, and hosts the sports talk program “The Drive with Paul Swann” on Kindred Communications’ WRVC-AM in Huntington.
The Virginias Associated Press Broadcasters Association also awarded a $1,000 scholarship to Alexa Bonilla. The release said Bonilla is a senior journalism major at James Madison University and serves as news director of the campus station, Breeze TV.
The release listed the winners across multiple divisions and categories, including combined TV and radio awards such as Best Podcast (Trey Kay and Samantha Gattsek of WVPB-FM) and Best Spot News (Frank Jones of WWBT-TV). It also named top awards across large and small market television and radio categories, along with recognitions for documentary or in-depth reporting, features, daily streams, specialty reporting, and station and team coverage.
In addition to individual honors, the winners list included multi-platform and investigative categories. For example, the release said WRIC-TV in Richmond won Best Continuing News for “Waverly Two Finally Free,” and WTKR/WGNT-TV won Best Investigative Reporting for “Woman Gets New Trial After WTKR Uncovers ‘Missing’ 911 Calls.”
The release also included honors recognizing reporting operations and community-focused programming, with awards listed for both TV/large market and TV/small market as well as for radio. Among the radio categories, it named winners including Dori Zook and others for Newscast and radio anchor roles, alongside heritage programming awards.