The Arizona Press Club is pleased to announce the winner of the 2016 Community Journalist of the Year Award.
Judges
Dennis Joyce is the assistant metro editor of the Tampa Bay Times, Autumn Phillips is the executive editor of the Quad-City Times and Dennis Anderson is the executive editor of the Peoria, Ill. Journal Star.
Community Journalist of the Year
Paulina Pineda
Nogales International
Pineda “pursues the stories and the people that define a community quite literally on the edge. Her reporting is characterized by genuine voices, including rural students who endure long school bus rides and farm workers concerned they might not be allowed back after visiting family in Mexico. She is up to the task of chronicling the unique border region in and around Santa Cruz County,” wrote Joyce.
First runner-up
Katie Campbell
Pinal Central
“It’s obvious that Katie Campbell has a bright future. Her work shows her dedication to working a beat, developing sources and looking outside of court documents for stories. She’s engaged on social media, on a variety of platforms, both with journalism as an industry and with her readers. She’s has also embraced photo and video, in a way that no editor could imagine her saying, ‘That’s not my job.'” wrote Philips.
Second runner-up
Glenn Gullickson
West Valley View
“The work of Glenn Gullickson is distinguished by the depth with which he pursued several of the topics included in his entry, such as a spike in monthly water bills that brought down a bureaucracy, and a hulking, little-used, long-abandoned horse-trotting stadium that now stands as a community white elephant,” Joyce wrote.