Delaware Currents honored with Excellence in New Jersey Local News Award for chemical spill coverage

Delaware Currents, a nonprofit online magazine that is the only news outlet dedicated to covering the four-state watershed and 330-mile river, won a 2025 Excellence in New Jersey Local News Award from the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University for its investigative report of a 2023 chemical spill in the Delaware River.

Meg McGuire, the founder, publisher and editor of Delaware Currents, and her husband, Chris Mele, a freelance writer and editor, were named as the award winners last month by the center. Delaware Currents was one of only 11 news outlets honored with the award out of 88 submissions, according to the center.

The awards, the center said, “recognize the essential work being done by reporters, editors, and news organizations across our state to keep communities informed, hold power accountable, and amplify diverse voices.”

A Sept. 3, 2024, article by Mele, “Response to 2023 Trinseo spill into the Delaware was slow and marked by botched communications, records show,” was a reconstructive narrative of what went wrong in March 2023, after more than 8,000 gallons of an acrylic latex polymer spilled into the Delaware River from a manufacturer of plastics and synthetic rubber based in Bristol, Pa.

The milky white substance poured into an outfall to Mill Creek, also known as Otter Creek. That creek, in turn, connects less than a mile away to the Delaware River, which is the source of drinking water to more than 14 million people in four states, including New Jersey.

The investigation, which took months and drew from more than 600 pages of government records, exposed regulatory failures, foot-dragging by polluters, and government miscommunication in the response to a major chemical spill affecting millions of residents.

“Through meticulous research and relentless pursuit of transparency, this work ensured that critical information about environmental safety and accountability was brought to light,” the center said. “The reporting serves as a model for investigative environmental journalism that keeps both polluters and officials in check.”

In a Sept. 9, 2024, editorial, “Philadelphia’s secrets are not in the public interest,” McGuire highlighted the protracted effort Delaware Currents faced to pry public records from the Philadelphia city government.

Delaware Currents had to fight to get a 200-page post-mortem about the response to the spill — known as an after-action report — compiled by Philadelphia’s Office of Emergency Management. The city at first issued a blanket denial for the report. The news site appealed and got almost all of the report but are still fighting for other portions it believes were wrongly redacted.

The editorial included the report for readers to see for themselves and called out the city’s hyper-secrecy about an issue of public importance.

This was the second year in a row that Delaware Currents was honored with an Excellence in New Jersey Local News Award by the center. In 2024, Delaware Currents won for its special investigative series exploring the explosive growth of warehouses in New Jersey.