Wednesday night of this week had the prestigious honor of being the 46th Annual Excellence in Journalism Awards, hosted by the San Diego Press Club. Several hundred of San Diego’s finest journalists were present to be honored for their great work and to celebrate the achievements of their colleagues – East County Californian reporters were among them.
Our non-daily newspaper entries held their own against other community papers this year.
Andrew Perez, one of the Cal’s community theater critics, won first place international travel story and photo for his coverage of the Notre-Dame fire while he was in Paris during his vacation – there’s a journalist who doesn’t know how to clock out! We ran his story on the front page, “An expatriate seeing Notre-Dame in flames.”
Cynthia Robertson won second place for her “Journey into the wilderness along Pine Creek,” for the wildlife and nature category.
Colin Grylls, who covered the 2018 East County football season in heartwrenching detail, won third place sports story for “Granite Hills strives to take rivalry game in memory of teammate who passed away last year.”
My coverage of the El Cajon Police Officer’s Association soccer shoot out with the Braves varsity team took second in the same category.
“A voice in the storm, a refuge in the dark,” our feature on Dilkhwaz Ahmed’s work in East County with refugee women struggling against issues of domestic violence won third place newspaper profile.
The Cal also won third place for our front page design on June 20, 2019 – “Margaret Hunter accepts plea deal.”
Collectively, this brings the Cal’s awards haul up to ten for the season, closing out another year of reporting for us.
I share this with you as an encouragement – no, as a promise. We promise to continue covering this community – from football games to local elections to Gold Award winning girl scouts – with integrity and enthusiasm, because it is our community too.
This newspaper is staffed by your friends and neighbors. They live where you live, eat where you eat, vote in polling boxes adjacent to yours and attend the same community theater performances and local art galleries that you do.
Local news is important because it’s our news. It’s our kids in the pool at swim and dive championships in the spring, it’s our city council members making decisions about our neighborhoods, and it’s our business districts growing and changing and serving the community. No one reports on these stories better than we do.
