LA Press Club Awards: WitnessLA Wins 1 (& Places in 2 More)

The 53rd Annual LA Press Club Awards were held on Sunday night at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel downtown.

The Crystal Ballroom was packed with print, online and on-air reporters, editors and producers who’d donned dressed-up finery to munch rubber-ish chicken dinners while an evening’s worth of awards were handed out, all of which in one way or another celebrated the news gathering profession.

I am pleased to announce that WitnessLA won 1st place for the Best Individual Weblog. (Wooo-hooo!!!)

The judges’ comments accompanying the award were: “Good reporting, passionate writing, righteous anger – the facts.”

We placed in a couple of categories too!

Specifically, our “Follow the Gang Money” series [here and here and here] that we did in partnership with Spot.Us, took 2nd place for Advocacy Journalism. (Reason Magazine won in that category.)

And Part 2 of that same “Follow the Gang Money” series, written by Matt Fleischer, won 3rd place in the Online Investigative category.

WitnessLA was also a finalist in the category of Best Website, Exclusively to the Internet. (Truthdig deservedly won in that category.)

In addition to a a very long list of other awards given, there were four special awards handed out during the night:

1. The Public Service Award went to Jeff Gottlieb and Ruben Vives of the LA Times for their fine work uncovering the Bell Scandal.

2. The Joseph M. Quinn Award to John Schwada of KTTV Fox 11

3. The President’s Award went to Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes.

4. The Daniel Pearl Award, which is always given out by Daniel Pearl’s father, was presented to Richard Engel of NBC News.

PLUS, at the end of the night, in a surprise award, Reason Magazine’s Radley Balko, who was Print Journalist of the Year (circulation under 50,000) was named Best of Show Journalist of the Year—and received a $1,000 check. (Balko, who has recently moved to Huffington Post, is doing some GREAT criminal justice work, like these stories.)

We were also very happy to see our pal Daniel Heimpel of FosteringMediaConnections.org, win for Online Journalist of the year.

Actually, we cheered for the victories of many very deserving friends, Advice Goddess (and fabulous dresser) Amy Alcon, a pile of terrific LA Weekly folks, Larry Mantle and Madeleine Brand from KPCC…..to name just a few off the top of my head.

The LA Press Club’s full list of winners may be found here.

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It’s the wee hours as I type, so I’ll wait to catch up on the rest of Monday’s news on Tuesday morning.

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