Usually it's the big-time reporters who break the big-time stories. In the case of sex abuser Jerry Sandusky and the culture of silence when it comes to winning team football coaches at schools like Penn State, it took a small town newspaper, the Harrisburg Patriot-News, and a 24-year-old reporter, Sara Ganim, a Penn State grad who was 22 when she started to work on the story, to break the news. It also took a women's fashion magazine, Glamour, to break the story about the reporter. Hmmmm ...

It took the national media seven months--after Sandusky was arrested--to pick up the story. In the meantime, Ganim and her paper took a lot of grief for something that seems to have been known by too many people for this to have taken so long to split wide open.

Ganim has continued to cover the story, even as other media water down what took place. Now she is the recipient of the Sidney Award for socially conscious journalism, and one more reason I am proud to be female. You go, girl.