Students and alumni show up big in San Francisco Press Club’s 47th Annual Journalism Awards

From top left: Susie Neilson, Tanay Gokhale, Yesica Prado, Ellie Prickett-Morgan, Pendarvis Harshaw, Mark Chediak, Renée Bartlett-Webber, Sasha Kohka and Laura Klivans.

Four current Berkeley Journalism students and 15 alumni were honored last month in the San Francisco Press Club’s 47th Annual Greater Bay Area Journalism Awards, which celebrate the best journalism from the region.

The winning entries represent extraordinary local reporting on everything from the housing and mental health crises, to deadly interactions with law enforcement officers regionally, to local election and immigration coverage and the safety of countertop fabrication workers.

Many of those honored are beat reporters, deeply engaged in their communities across the Bay Area. And two are members of the California Local News Fellowship program — the largest publicly-funded news initiative in the country — launched with state funding in 2022 and housed at Berkeley Journalism.

From top left: Zhe Wu, Lakshmi Sarah, Liliana Michelena, HR Smith, Rachael Myrow, Erin Sheridan, Vanessa Rancano, Tyche Hendricks and Victoria Mauleón.

Erin Sheridan (‘26) was awarded the $2,500 Emerging Journalist Scholarship, which helps promising young journalists ease the many financial burdens facing students.

Holly McDede (‘25) was on the team awarded third place in the radio/audio non-commercial feature category for “In Harm’s Way” on KALW. The series featured stories of workers on the frontlines of Bay Area harm reduction and overdose response — people who save lives for low pay, while often dealing with their own trauma.

Ellie Prickett-Morgan (’26) was part of the team that won second place in the podcast news category for “Nursing Home Staff Shortages Leave Patients Waiting in Hospitals” about how some of the state’s sickest patients are stranded in hospitals rooms for weeks, months, and even years as they wait to be moved into nursing homes and psychiatric facilities, for KQED’s “The Bay”. The backup is caused by nursing home staffing shortages, coupled with a rapidly aging population.

Renée Bartlett-Webber (’26) won best College Media column for the “Community College Coverage Column”; second place and third place in the College Media investigative reporting category for “City College Struggles to Manage Temperatures in it’s Classrooms” and “City College Grapples with Layoffs and Push to Rehire Faculty”, all published in The Guardsman.

For bringing hidden stories to light and showing initiative and depth of research, the top investigative reporting award in the daily newspaper category went to investigative reporter Susie Neilson (’19) of the San Francisco Chronicle for “Fast and Fatal”. The series, which involved a year of creating national datasets, investigated the nation’s growing death toll from police pursuits and the lack of accountability for officers who initiate the chases.

The Chronicle found that 3,336 people were killed as a result of police chases from 2017 through 2022, including 15 police officers and at least 551 bystanders. Tens of thousands of people were also injured during these pursuits.

Lakshmi Sarah (‘16) at the 47th awards show Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024. Photo: Photo: Brian Watt/KQED.

Multimedia journalist Yesica Prado (’18) was awarded the top prize in investigative reporting for non-daily newspapers for San Francisco’s public health response to the mental health crises on the streets, for the San Francisco Public Press. Read the stories here and here.

Victoria Mauleón (’01), Sasha Kohka (’04) and Lakshmi Sarah (‘16) won first place in the podcast general interest category for a story on a family who fled violence in India’s Manipur state, for KQED’s California Report Magazine. The project, funded through the Pulitzer Center, reported on how despite being physically removed from the turmoil, people still grapple with the impacts of the violence they escaped and their experiences of displacement, trauma, and the challenges they face in rebuilding their lives in a new country.

Mark Chediak (’05) won third place for investigative reporting in digital media for “Groundwater Gold Rush” for Bloomberg Green which was also a 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist. HR Smith (’07) won third place for series or continuing coverage in digital media for the series “See How They Run,” about the 2024 mayoral race for the nonprofit newsroom Mission Local. Liliana Michelena (‘18) received third place in the sports feature category for “BURRITOOOOOOOAL!” about a local taqueria’s soccer team winning a big upset against a professional team, also for Mission Local.

Tanay Gokhale (front) with Vijay Rajvaidya and Vandana Kumar, display journalistic excellence certificates awarded to India Currents at the 47 Annual San Francisco Press Club Awards ceremony.

Tanay Gokhale (‘23), a California Local News Fellow and the community reporter at India Currents, won second place in the digital media columns-sports category for “Cricket Fever,” on the burgeoning popularity of cricket in the U.S.

Rachael Myrow (’95) was on the team that won first place in the feature story/serious subject radio/audio non-commercial category for “California Regulators to Vote on Emergency Rules for Stonecutters’ Safety,” for KQED. The story focused on new emergency regulations to protect countertop fabrication workers handling engineered stone linked to an accelerated and more aggressive form of silicosis with a fatality rate of 19% in the industry, according to state workplace regulators. Housing reporter Vanessa Rancano (’14) won third place for “Why California Doesn’t Know How Many People Are Dying While Homeless” for KQED.

Rancano (’14) also won, along with Laura Klivans (’16), first place in the podcast news category for “Sold Out: Rethinking Housing In America” for KQED. The podcast examined California’s housing affordability crisis and imagines what housing can be in America.

Zhe Wu (’23) won second place for series or continuing coverage in the newspapers non-daily category for “Language Access at San Francisco City Hall” for the San Francisco Public Press. She writes for the Public Press as a member of the first cohort of the Berkeley Journalism-based California Local News Fellowship program.

Artwork for Yesica Prado’s (’18) story awarded the top prize in investigative reporting for non-daily newspapers.

Pendarvis Harshaw (’14) won third place in the podcast general interest category for “Hyphy Kids Got Trauma”, a four-part series about coming of age during one of the most significant times in Bay Area hip-hop history, for KQED’s arts and culture podcast Rightnowish. The series highlighted a youth culture driven by “uptempo music, oversized airbrushed white T-shirts, big-ass sunglasses called stunna shades and candy painted cars doing donuts in intersections” but that beneath it all was pain, and the music was an outlet; a salve for the wounds caused by the world.

Artwork for Pendarvis Harshaw’s (’14) third place win in the podcast general interest category for ‘Hyphy Kids Got Trauma: “We Dance Different”’ for KQED’s Rightnowish podcast series.

Tyche Hendricks (’96) won first place in the radio/audio non-commercial series or continuing coverage category for “With New Immigration Court Opening in Concord, Bay Area Legal Advocates Scramble to Represent Asylum Seekers” for KQED. The story revealed that until now, 27 judges in San Francisco’s court — one of the nation’s busiest immigration courts — with help from a smaller court in Sacramento, have handled all immigration cases from Bakersfield, California, to the Oregon border. With 160,000 pending cases, each case was taking more than three and a half years to complete, on average.

The 47th awards show was held Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024, at the Julia Morgan Ballroom in San Francisco.

(From Left to Right) Stafford Hemmer, Holly McDede (’25), Mario Butzner, Charles Lighthouse, Porfirio Rangel, Johanna Miyaki, Galnadgee Joe-Johnson, Devon Strolovitch, David Kwan and Ben Trefny of KALW.

–Marlena Telvick