Announcing the winners of the 2021 Excellence in Local News Awards
Amid a pandemic, a racial reckoning and divisive election, here’s some of the best journalism we saw in New Jersey
The Center for Cooperative Media is thrilled to announce the winners of the fourth annual NJ News Commons Excellence in Local News Awards.
Due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, we won’t be holding a celebratory awards luncheon this year, but all of our winners will still receive a certificate and award money for work they did in 2020 in innovation, collaboration, investigative reporting, sustainability, and engagement. We also have awards for Outstanding Campus Media and Partner of the Year.
The award categories are based on key areas of focus for NJ News Commons members, a network of nearly 400 news organizations and freelancers across New Jersey. The NJ News Commons is the flagship project of the Center for Cooperative Media.
Now, let’s get to the winners!
Engage Local
This award goes to a journalist(s) or news organization that relied heavily on community engagement or similar practices as a major source or aspect of their reporting.
Winners: Brit Harley of the Newark News + Story Collaborative and Christina Noble of Stories of Atlantic City. The Newark News + Story Collaborative brings together local reporters, media-makers and city residents to respond to information needs and concerns of Newark residents during the pandemic and beyond. Over the last year, Brit has worked tirelessly to launch the project in the midst of the pandemic, training Newark residents to produce unique coverage of issues that are impacting diverse communities in Newark.
Stories of Atlantic City is a community-driven local media project that is deeply rooted in engagement. Christina joined Stories of AC as the project manager over the summer, and has helped the team cover how the residents of Atlantic City have responded to the pandemic, the election and the racial uprisings across the country in 2020. (Disclosure: The Center for Cooperative Media helped launch Stories of Atlantic City in 2019.)
Collaborate Local
This award goes to a journalist(s) or news organization that leveraged the power of cooperative or strategic partnerships to take their reporting beyond what would have been possible on their own.
Winner: Dan Sforza, Jim O’Neill and The Record for Loved and Lost. Dan, Jim and the team at NorthJersey.com launched the Loved and Lost project in response to the thousands of New Jersey residents who lost their lives to COVID-19. The goal of the project is to name and celebrate the lives of every New Jersey resident who dies from the virus. Shortly after launching the project, the Center for Cooperative Media joined to help turn it into a statewide collaborative. Since then, the project has added 21 New Jersey newsrooms and several freelancers as reporting partners. The “Wall of Names” on the Loved and Lost website now hosts more than 1,000 names and profiles.
Investigate Local
This award goes to a journalist(s) or news organization whose investigative reporting efforts had a demonstrable impact on the community they serve.
Winner: Matt Skoufalos of NJ Pen. Last summer, Matt caught word of a Woodlynne police officer who had seemingly abused his authority in preemptively pepper-spraying a group of young people gathered on a private porch. A review of the officer’s record revealed he was no stranger to excessive force, having been suspended six months into the job for shooting a suspect who was fleeing from the scene of a gas station robbery. NJ Pen was the first news agency to break the pepper-spray story, and as other outlets picked it up, pressure mounted, and the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office levied formal charges against the officer in question. Recently, the officer took a plea deal and will no longer hold public office or work in law enforcement in New Jersey.
Innovate Local
This award goes to a journalist(s) or news organization that used new and emerging technologies or strategies to enhance and improve the value and impact of their reporting efforts.
Winner: Simon Galperin of the Bloomfield Information Project. The Bloomfield Information Project’s “news harvest” workflow mixes automation and human effort to create a daily aggregate news product that aims to address information inequity in a given community. Simon has also been working with other news organizations across the state to help them implement a similar news harvest program in their communities. The Bloomfield Information Project also launched a COVID-19 community information dashboard at the beginning of the pandemic to keep residents informed about the operating status of various municipal services and other community needs.
Sustain Local
This award goes to a journalist(s) or news organization that found innovative and effective new ways to address revenue and sustainability issues.
Winner: TAPinto was one of only approximately 30 publishers across the country to be accepted into the Local Media Association, Local Media Consortium and Facebook “Branded Content Project.” This program enabled TAPinto to develop a paid social media component to its DIY content marketing offerings for businesses and organizations, which has been profiled by the Local Media Association and the Lenfest Institute, among others.
TAPinto’s strategy was to build on an already-functioning revenue stream within its franchisee ecosystem. It took Facebook’s API and integrated it with its do-it-yourself content marketing platform, allowing businesses, nonprofits and governments to have content published on TAPinto’s local sites and also pay for a sponsored “Paid Partnership” Facebook post. Prior to launch, the DIY program was generating approximately $5,000 each month. Since the Facebook initiative went live, average monthly revenue has grown to more than $8,000 per month.
Outstanding Campus Media
This award category is for a journalist or campus news organization whose reporting efforts had a demonstrable impact on the college or university community they serve.
Winner: The Gothic Times at New Jersey City University. From the beginning of the pandemic, the student journalists at the Gothic Times focused on keeping their community safe. From sharing and publishing articles about current COVID-19 statistics in New Jersey to reminding its community on social media to wear a mask and practice social distancing, it was clear from the outset how much Gothic Times reporters cared about their community. Faculty adviser Theta Pavis-Weil also attended nearly every meeting of the NJ College News Commons last year and came up with the idea to have an election night scenario training before the 2020 presidential election.
Partner of the Year
This award goes to a journalist or news organization that showed overall excellence in their work in 2020.
Winner: Kleibeel Marcano of Reporte Hispano. When COVID-19 finally reached the American shores, it highlighted stark racial disparities in the access, development and dissemination of information in the U.S. media. Ethnic, immigrant and non-English speaking communities, which are already disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, are at the bottom of the power hierarchy. Kleibeel Marcano, executive editor of Reporte Hispano, has risen to these challenges by providing Spanish-speaking communities in New Jersey with information from a statewide and policy perspective about the virus and how it affects health, immigration, housing, education and other local and national social issues that matter to the Latino community.
Kleibeel was part of the Center’s reporting fellowship on COVID-19 and the translation program for COVID-19 and election stories in a partnership that involved NJ Spotlight News, NJ.com, and NorthJersey.com. His translation has helped ensure the much-needed information disseminated to Spanish-speaking communities is accurate and timely — and answers the needs of the community. Kleibeel’s participation in the Center’s initiatives also resulted in a reporting collaboration with NJ.com/The Star Ledger, where Kleibeel and a staff reporter worked on two election and coronavirus-related stories that focused on the Latino community — and both stories were published on the front page of The Star Ledger.
Kleibeel’s work in journalism underscores the multilingual, multicultural journalism and collaboration that our diverse communities need today, especially in the midst of a pandemic and political shift in our country.
Congratulations to all the winners!
Joe Amditis is the associate director of the Center for Cooperative Media. You can reach me on Twitter at @jsamditis or via email at amditisj@montclair.edu.
About the Center for Cooperative Media: The Center is a grant-funded program of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. Its mission is to grow and strengthen local journalism, and in doing so serve New Jersey residents. The Center is supported with funding from Montclair State University, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, the New Jersey Local News Lab (a partnership of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, and Community Foundation of New Jersey), and the Abrams Foundation. For more information, visit CenterforCooperativeMedia.org.
