Nancy Conway, editor of The Salt Lake Tribune, and John Hughes, executive editor of the Deseret Morning News, will receive Sunshine Awards for forming the Utah Media Coalition. The coalition fought against bills in the Utah Legislature earlier this year that aimed to restrict public access to government records and make access more expensive and difficult.

Conway and Hughes will be recognized Aug. 26 during the SPJ Convention and National Journalism Conference in Chicago.

"The honor really should be shared with the entire Utah Media Coalition. The reason we were able to do that good work for access to information is we had the unity that we did. We had the power of all the media in the state of Utah behind us," Conway said Tuesday.

Conway and Hughes co-chaired the "war room," which on a daily basis coordinated and executed the coalition's lobbying efforts against the bills during the legislative session, according to a nominating letter written by Jeffrey Hunt, a Salt Lake City media attorney, and Joel Campbell, co-chair of SPJ's National Freedom of Information Committee.

"Without the leadership of Conway and Hughes in convincing the Utah news media to put aside their competitive differences and band together to fight these dangerous legislative proposals, several of these bills would have passed and the Government Records Access and Management Act would have been crippled," Hunt and Campbell wrote. "Not since GRAMA was enacted 15 years ago, have Utah's news media organizations banded together with such focus and commitment to protect the public's right to know."

SPJ will also recognize Ryan Nees, a Kokomo, Ind., high school student, whose request for information about the mayor's fundrasing practices turned into a legal battle.