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The Mountain View Voice earned top recognition for its investigative reporting last year, and was honored for its coverage of education and even sports, at an awards ceremony held over the weekend in Los Angeles. The Voice earned a total of five awards.
The California News Publishers Association holds the annual contest for print and online newspapers across the state, with just shy of 3,000 entries this year. The Voice competes with other newspapers of similar size, pitting it against publications with between 300,000 and 399,000 unique monthly visitors.
The Voice took first place in investigative reporting for its coverage of LifeMoves Mountain View, a transitional housing project meant to serve as an important pipeline between homelessness and permanent housing. Reporters Malea Martin and Magali Gauthier spent months looking into problems reported at the facility, and critical questions about the effectiveness of the program.
Judges’ comments called it “solid reporting … bolstered by numerous interviews with all parties make for reports that readers can understand.”
Grabbing second place for coverage of youth and education is reporter Zoe Morgan, who wrote a story on the looming concerns among Mountain View High journalists that school administrators were exerting too much control over the student newspaper.
Judges wrote that Morgan had done a “fine job explaining the rules and laws governing students newspapers and held power accountable for the decisions they make.” Since then, two students and the advisor to the student newspaper have filed a lawsuit alleging coercion and retaliation.
Though limited in the world of sports reporting, the Voice took high honors with a second-place win in the sports feature category for Emily Margaretten’s coverage of kick volleyball, a sport gaining popularity here in the Bay Area. Judges gave kudos for neatly describing the sport and how it works, and why it has significance here locally. It was one of two stories highlighting unusual sports in Mountain View, the other being kayak polo.
On the photo journalism side of things, Gauthier also won third place for feature photos at Foothill College. Her photos accompanied Morgan’s story on the bachelor’s degree programs in respiratory therapy and dental hygiene at the college, launched under a pilot program that was made permanent under state legislation.
Though the Voice mostly competed for awards in its division, it submitted its LifeMoves coverage to the “Open Division,” in which publications across California regardless of size vie for recognition. Martin and Gauthier’s work won fifth place in the investigative reporting category for their work.
How did I miss this!
Of course, under the editorial leadership of Kevin Forestieri / who himself ‘years ago’ won recognition in investigative reporting on local education matters (MVWSD’s middle school math ‘problematic handling of Teach to One’). An investigative series that won the public service award & took first place for education coverage
April 14, 2018 article by then editor Andrea Gemmet.