The Lens and ProPublica have earned first-place honors in the National Headliner Awards for their collaboration on “Losing Ground,” a multimedia project on Louisiana’s coastal land loss.

The Lens was the only publication in Louisiana to win a Headliner Award for work published in 2014.

The awards are chosen by the Press Club of Atlantic City, which considers work submitted from across the country. The first awards were given in 1934, and the club says the program is one of the oldest and largest annual contests “recognizing journalistic merit in the communications industry.”

Also placing in the same category were the Medill Watchdog team from Northwestern University outside of Chicago, which earned second place; and ProPublica, which also took third place.

The Lens and ProPublica are both nonprofit newsrooms, a relatively new category of journalism nationwide.

The project has already been honored with an award for journalism innovation in watchdog journalism, and another for news design.

Reporting for The Lens was led by Bob Marshall, a two-time Pulitizer-Prize winning journalist who has covered the outdoors and environmental issues in Louisiana for more than 30 years. Al Shaw and Brian Jacobs of ProPublica worked with historical and satellite images to create the stunning presentation that lets our audience see in great detail the land that has been lost.