The Tribune’s Peggy Fletcher Stack wins top religion reporting prize for fifth year

Winning journalism awards is hardly new for The Salt Lake Tribune’s Peggy Fletcher Stack, but it never gets old either.

On Wednesday, The Tribune’s senior religion writer was named the nation’s top religion reporter among midsize newspapers, the fifth time she has earned the honor.

Stack won the Religion News Association’s Cornell Award for her stories last year about the #DezNat movement’s online army of self-appointed warriors defending The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the push and pull between conservative and progressive forces at Brigham Young University, and the evolving debate about Mormonism’s belief in a Heavenly Mother.

Stack’s latest accolade was announced at RNA’s awards ceremony at the Columbia Journalism School in New York.

She previously earned the top Cornell prize in 2004, 2012, 2017 and 2018. She also collected the American Academy of Religion Award in 2013 and was a co-author of one of the stories in The Tribune’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation of sexual assaults at Utah colleges.

In 2018, she received the Josephine Zimmerman Pioneer in Journalism Award from the Utah chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Stack co-founded the International Association of Religion Journalists in 2012 and is operating as the global group’s executive director.

Since joining The Tribune in 1991, Stack has written about new popes and old professors, rising apostles and fallen zealots, powerful preachers who command the pulpit and common parishioners who fill the pews. Her faith coverage has taken her all over the world — from Asia to Africa, South America to Europe, and U.S. locales stretching from Boston to the Bay Area. She wrote this year about her visits to the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and the Holy Land.

Earlier this month, in a testament to her staying power, Stack covered her 62nd consecutive General Conference of the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.