CalMatters journalists nominated 7 times in Sacramento Press Club Awards

CalMatters journalists are finalists in seven categories in this year’s 3rd Annual awards for the best politics and public policy journalism in the state.

The nonprofit newsroom’s staff has won several top honors in the previous two years of the contest, including first place in reporting on housing and homelessness by Manuela Tobias and journalist of the year for Laurel Rosenhall.

Awards will be presented at the Press Club’s awards gala on March 29. Here are this year’s CalMatters finalists:

Alexei Koseff for Capitol beat coverage:

• Gavin Newsom was the face of legal cannabis in California. Can he fix its problems?
• ‘When you don’t know where to go, you come here:’ California preps to be a haven for abortion rights
• ‘Forcing the hand’: Gavin Newsom leans into legislative agenda as first term nears end
• Inside the team pioneering California’s red flag law
• Buried treasure: California politicians stash $35 million in leftover campaign cash
  

Manuela Tobias for reporting on housing and the unhoused:

• Anti-worker or pro-worker? Why labor unions are fighting over a housing bill
• Labor unions have a week to agree on housing bills. Can they do it?
• Rival fast-track housing bills? California lawmakers pick both
  

Mikhail Zinshteyn for education reporting:

• Cal State’s Black students are falling behind other groups — and poor graduation data obscures the crisis
• Cal Poly SLO enrolls the lowest rate of Black students among all the state’s public universities

Jocelyn Wiener for social justice and equity reporting: 

• No way out: Why a mentally disabled man was jailed nine years awaiting a murder trial that never happened

In business and labor reporting the CalMatters team of Alejandro Lazo, Jeanne Kuang and Lil Kalish, with contributions from CBS Sacramento reporter Julie Watts, for their California Divide wage theft series:

• Wage Theft: Car wash workers in $2.3 million case await pay 3 years later
• Wage theft whack-a-mole: California workers win judgments against bosses but still don’t get paid
• Agency battling wage theft in California is too short-staffed to do its job
  

Also in the business and labor category, Koseff for his cannabis coverage:

• Gavin Newsom was the face of legal cannabis in California. Can he fix its problems?
• California’s next cannabis battle may be coming to a city near you
• California cuts cannabis taxes to heal ailing industry

Kristen Hwang for public health coverage:

• How California created the nation’s easiest abortion access — and why it’s going further
• Congenital syphilis rates soar across California as public health funding dwindled prior to the pandemic
• More street medicine teams tackle the homeless health care crisis