Three Lexington Herald-Leader journalists on Wednesday were awarded a McClatchy President's Award for their work on a yearlong series about Central Kentucky's signature Thoroughbred farms.

Reporter Janet Patton, photographer Charles Bertram and series editor Scott Shive won the award for the "Fields of Dreams" series, which followed the life and business cycle of the Thoroughbred industry by focusing on a different farm each month.

The annual President's Awards are the highest employee honors given by The McClatchy Company, the Herald-Leader's parent. Judging the competition this year were Susan Goldberg, executive editor at Bloomberg News; Marty Kaiser, editor and senior vice president at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and Anders Gyllenhaal, McClatchy's vice president for news and Washington editor.

The judges lauded Fields of Dreams for its writing, which they described as "a kind of journalistic poetry," and photos, which they called "breathtaking."

This is the third President's Award won by the Herald-Leader since it was acquired by McClatchy in 2006.

In 2009, the Herald-Leader won for an investigative series on questionable spending at quasi-public organizations. In 2010, the Herald-Leader won an all-staff award for coverage of the Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games.

READ THE SERIES

To read the award-winning stories in "Fields of Dreams," go to Kentucky.com.