The Weekly team takes a moment to celebrate at the California Journalism Awards.

Sara Rubin here, taking a moment to brag. I’m so proud of my colleagues at the Monterey County Weekly day in and day out. I am fortunate to work alongside people who are dedicated to producing high-quality local journalism, people who are creative and curious and willing to ask tough questions. 

It’s the work we do every day, on deadline and then onto the next deadline. So it’s a bit of a thrill when a few of us took a break from it all to attend the annual California Journalism Awards ceremony in Los Angeles on Saturday, May 17, and returned home with some significant accolades.

For the second year in a row, we won General Excellence in Division 4 (our category for midsized and large weekly papers). Of all of the awards our team brought home, this stands out as a recognition of the paper in its entirety, a collaboration between journalists and graphic designers and our sales team and office team—every individual’s efforts are acknowledged in this collective award for our paper that comes out every Thursday and our newsletter that comes out daily. 

We also received five other first place awards in Division 4: Pam Marino for health care reporting for her continued deep dive on costs, David Schmalz for transportation reporting on the SURF! busway, Agata Popęda for our calendar (in print and online), Daniel Dreifuss and Karen Loutzenheiser for cover art and design, and I won for investigative reporting (for coverage of Carmel Unified School District).

We earned second-place honors for enterprise reporting (Schmalz for coverage of a tyrannical HOA at East Garrison), photo essay (Dreifuss and Sloan Campi for a report on the Worlds Away festival), coverage of business and the economy (Erik Chalhoub for reporting on Amazon coming to Salinas), public service journalism (shared by the Weekly and Monterey County Media Literacy Coalition) and columns (for my “Local Spin” column). There are even more awards, viewable on the California News Publishers Association’s website. 

It was a fun time celebrating great journalism produced by outlets all over California, but it’s also a sobering event. Daniel Tedford, senior editor at the Southern California News Group, spoke about coverage of the Los Angeles fires and how personal the work felt to him and his team. Physical spaces that mattered to him and his community—his kid’s preschool, a venue where he’d been a groomsman, and so on—were destroyed. It was a reminder that covering local journalism is a responsibility, and that it matters to our readers and to our journalists.

Of course, our readers are a part of our success too, so thank you. We are in a dialogue with all of you and as always, welcome your story ideas and letters. Thank you for reading and for celebrating with us.