In summary
The awards honor excellence in digital journalism around the world.
The Markup, now a part of CalMatters, has won first place for general excellence among small newsrooms while CalMatters was a finalist for general excellence among medium-sized newsrooms in the 2024 Online News Awards.
In each size category, ONA’s general excellence award “honors a digitally focused news organization that successfully fulfills its editorial mission, effectively serves its audience, maximizes the use of digital tools and platforms and represents the highest journalistic standards.”
Winners were announced Friday at the Online News Association’s conference in Atlanta.
CalMatters’ excellence honor
CalMatters was a finalist for general excellence in online journalism, medium-sized newsrooms. Congratulations to our fellow finalists, The Marshall Project and The Texas Tribune, and to the winning newsroom, ProPublica.
CalMatters was recognized for work that includes:
Our unprecedented new Digital Democracy project which deploys AI, bots and data scrapers to demystify state government: It collects transcripts and video of every word spoken in a public meeting, six categories of financial giving, each bill introduced and vote cast, every supporter and opponent, every lobbyist and interest group, and more. We’re sharing this resource with journalists who admire the stories it’s enabling us to produce — of the past million votes cast by California legislators, Democrats voted “no” less than 1% of the time. This CBS piece explains why Digital Democracy is a “game changer.”
Our dissection of California’s unparalleled pandemic-era unemployment fiasco: The state sent tens of billions of dollars to scammers while denying the claims of desperate workers who lost stability, homes, even their lives. We found workers on Facebook, Reddit, Telegram, and from more than 500 responses to our online survey. Our calculator invited readers to see how long they’d need to work to earn what the state lost to pandemic unemployment fraud (for someone earning $80,000 a mere 250,000 years.)
A California wildfire tracker that tracks real-time flare ups and highlights historical trends. The map visualizes active large fires using points and fire perimeter shapes, while a time-lapse shows historical wildfire burn areas from 1900 forward, and illustrates the costs in dollars and lives.
When California became the first state to recommend reparations to Black people for the harms of slavery and discrimination we responded with a multimedia card deck explainer to resolve debates over facts, such as whether slavery had existed in California, and to hold ducking lawmakers accountable. We built a customizable tool so people could see what might be owed them, and a Google form solicited questions for additional coverage. State commission members cited our work to explain theirs; the chairperson touted our calculator.
And our reporting documented an accelerating trend of California hospitals shuttering or suspending maternity wards. When we initially published, in 12 counties, no hospitals delivered babies — and our Census tract analysis showed Latino and low-income communities hit hardest. To enhance this story, we interactively mapped gap areas, constructed a sortable table of ward/hospital closures, and embedded unfurlable cards rich with Digital Democracy detail about key legislators — plus a clickable link to email them. Now they’re citing our story as they pursue a legislative fix.
The Markup wins general excellence, small newsroom
Judges said The Markup’s work was: “Outstanding, actionable journalism that given the subject manner could not have come at a more consequential moment.”
Sisi Wei, editor-in-chief of The Markup from 2022-24 and now CalMatters chief impact officer, accepted the award.
“The Markup is getting this award for the very first time and it is so exciting. …I am very, very proud of our entire team,” Wei said.
“We are very well known for how we do our data-driven reporting and our software-driven reporting,” Wei said. “We’ve managed to turn that technical expertise and marry that with making sure that we’re giving people real, impactful and actionable things to do once they read our investigative journalism. How can they make their lives better, how can they change things, what information do they need in order to do that? And are we giving it to them.”
The Markup also won the Gather award for community-centered journalism and also previously won the Excellence in Technology Reporting award, both in the small newsroom category.
