By ScheerPost Staff / Original to ScheerPost
ScheerPost staff members won six awards, including two first place honors at the 64th annual Southern California Journalism Awards gala on Saturday honoring journalists from print, television, radio, digital and student media platforms. More than 2,000 journalists competed, their work judged by members of other press clubs across the country. ScheerPost staff members were finalists in eight categories.
Natasha Hakimi Zapata, one of ScheerPost’s contributing editors, won the Foreign Correspondents—Critic category for her reporting for The Nation on the many ways Britain’s Conservative officials and their connections profited financially from the mass death event in “Covid-19 Is a Boon for UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Buds.”
“Natasha Hakimi Zapata’s column on the myriad entanglements of Boris Johnson’s administration with supporters granted COVID-19 contracts doesn’t pull a punch, but neither does it swing too hard or below the belt. It’s firmly grounded and carries the reader through a complex arrangement with a lively, concise voice and eye for telling detail,” commented the judges. This is her second consecutive time winning first place award in this category.
Dwayne Booth, who draws under the name Mr. Fish, also won first prize for his editorial cartoon, “Happy Indigenous People’s Day From Those Who Made It Possible,” below.
“Mr. Fish reinvigorated a familiar parallel with an artful and heavy, but not heavy-handed, rendering,” judges commented.
ScheerPost contributor Chris Hedges won second prize for online columnist for his weekly columns.
ScheerPost’s publisher and executive editor Robert Scheer was awarded in three categories for his Scheer Intelligence podcast, hosted by KCRW, “Audio Journalist of the Year” (third place) and—along with the show’s executive producer, Joshua Scheer, for interviews with activist Prof. Melina Abdullah “Black Lives Matter: ‘When We Fight, We Win,” second place and scholar Tony Platt on how “California’s Grim Genocidal Past Implicates the University of California,” third place in the “Talk/Public Affairs” category.
Victoria Valenzuela, ScheerPost’s managing editor and a masters student at USC, also was honored Saturday along with Brandeis University student River Simard as the two inaugural recipients of the LA Press Club’s Tony Ross Scholarship, a $5,000 grant named for a promising journalist who died in his sophomore year in college.
The award ceremony was capped by honoring CBS News and 60 Minutes correspondent Bill Whitaker with the Joseph M. Quinn Award for Lifetime Achievement.