Inside GNSS Correspondent Wins Military Reporters & Editors Contest Award for Coverage of GPS Signal Patent Dispute - Inside GNSS - Global Navigation Satellite Systems Engineering, Policy, and Design

Inside GNSS Correspondent Wins Military Reporters & Editors Contest Award for Coverage of GPS Signal Patent Dispute

Dee Ann Divis

Inside GNSS coverage of the GPS intellectual property dispute between the United Kingdom and the United States has won the magazine’s Washington correspondent, Dee Ann Divis, another journalism award — this one from the Military Reporters & Editors Association.


Inside GNSS coverage of the GPS intellectual property dispute between the United Kingdom and the United States has won the magazine’s Washington correspondent, Dee Ann Divis, another journalism award — this one from the Military Reporters & Editors Association.

The awards, for work published or aired in 2012, will be presented October 18 at the 2013 MRE Conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. The Military Reporters & Editors Association is a professional organization for media professionals working in the military and veterans communities. The contest was coordinated through the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, D.C. bureau.

Divis’s award came in the category for “Print – Domestic coverage, small circulation” magazines (fewer than 100,000 subscribers).

In making the award, the contest organizers stated, “Divis provided exclusive stories that exposed a scheme to control intellectual property that could have forced the U.S. military to pay to use a signal on its own GPS system. A British military lab filed patents on technology donated by the U.S. to a joint satellite navigation system with European allies, then demanded royalties. The U.S. and United Kingdom subsequently announced the UK would make its GPS patents public domain.

Earlier this year, the GPS patent dispute coverage earned Divis the 2013 Dateline award for Washington Correspondent from the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) – DC Chapter. This is the second year in a row that Divis has won the SPJ correspondent award. In 2012 she also won SPJ-DC Chapter’s highest honor, the Robert D.G. Lewis Watchdog Award.

IGM_e-news_subscribe