Ortiz wins National Headliners Award

Lexington Herald-Leader reporter Brandon Ortiz ’04 says the first few early morning hours in August, as he and other reporters scrambled to cover the deadly crash of a passenger jet at Blue Grass Airport, were “like D-Day.”

Ortiz said he had only had about three hours' sleep the morning of August 27 when he got the call at home to head to the airport, where Comair flight 5191, its pilots inadvertently maneuvering on a runway too short to allow a safe takeoff, crashed. Of the 50 passengers and crew, 49 were killed.

Ortiz, one of the first two Herald-Leader reporters at the scene, said he jumped a fence and waded a creek to get within 100 yards of the crash scene before being warned back by police. A airport briefing area was eventually set up at nearby Keeneland Racetrack

“The entire day, we operated on adrenaline,” said Ortiz, the Herald-Leader’s award-winning courts reporter. “I’d only had about three hours’ sleep. I didn’t really feel it until that weekend.”

The professional payoff for Ortiz and his team of colleagues has been two first-place awards -- one a National Headliners Award, the other from the Kentucky Press Association for spot news coverage.

The awards have been piling up for Ortiz, a former editor in chief  of Image magazine and twice the editor in chief of the TCU Daily Skiff. Since joining the Herald-Leader as its transportation reporter,  covering the Blue Grass Airport and regional transportation issues, Ortiz has also received a third-place award this year for best investigative story, three second-place 2005 awards for best enterprise/analytical story, best general news story, and best on-going coverage.