This awards season provides good reminders to celebrate a rockstar team.

Sara Rubin here, with a shout-out to everyone who makes the Monterey County Weekly, Monterey County Now and Salinas Valley Now go. You hear from us in the newsroom regularly in this newsletter intro column, but the whole endeavor relies on a lot more than that. 

Aaron Thomas oversees the distribution team responsible for getting physical newspapers delivered all over the county every week. Director of Digital Media Kevin Smith spends a lot of time recommending we restart (sorry Kevin, we haven’t learned yet) and keeping our technology humming and website live. Office Manager Linda Maceira does a little bit of everything needed to keep this place humming (I may have not yet figured out the magic of the computer restart, but I have figured out how to replace the toner in the printer, but I still need a pep talk from Linda before attempting this). 

There is a team of four in the production department, responsible for designing and creating all of the visual elements—laying out words and photos produced by the newsroom, and laying out and in some cases creating advertisements for clients of the sales department. And perhaps most unsung but most critical to keeping everything going is that sales team of four people, pounding the pavement daily to connect with clients. 

That’s a long preamble to say I work with an awesome and successful bunch of people, but journalism awards have a way of ignoring all of those critical elements of the work. (Seriously, is there an award for best accounts payable team at a newspaper?) 

Luckily for the editorial department, there are awards that recognize some of our best work, and the Weekly team took home quite a haul in the 2025 California Journalism Awards, announced earlier this week. We submit what we think is our best work and it’s judged against that of our peers across the state. 

We brought home seven first-place awards in the categories of Best Newsletter (that’s this newsletter you are reading right now, Monterey County Now); Enterprise News, for a collaborative cover story detailing federal spending in Monterey County; Breaking News, for coverage of a fatal shark attack at Lovers Point last December; Investigative Reporting for an investigation into corruption at the Head Start program; Immigration Reporting for a series of stories on local reactions and responses to a federal crackdown; Agricultural Reporting for coverage of the changing wine grape industry; and Columns for “The Local Spin.” 

As a team, we also earned two second-place awards. One recognizes Public Service Journalism, for our ongoing coverage of the catastrophic lithium ion battery fire in Moss Landing. The other is for General Excellence in Division 4, the closest approximation a recognition like this can come to uplifting all of the unsung members of the team that make a newsroom go. 

Of course, the other part of the equation that’s not acknowledged here are our readers—so I’ll take this chance to say thank you for being part of the winning mix.