Four alums honored in 2023 Sigma Delta Chi Awards

April Dembosky, Erica Hellerstein, Stephen Hobbs and Bill Whitaker.

Four prolific Berkeley Journalism alums were honored with Sigma Delta Chi Awards for the most outstanding work published or broadcast in 2023. Their coverage explored everything from the paucity of mental health care to court challenges regarding social media content moderators in Africa to the stunning number of skydiving accidents at one Northern California company.

April Dembosky (’08) won for best Science, Environmental and Climate Reporting in Television or Audio for her deeply reported story, “Proven Schizophrenia Treatments Keep People in School, at Work and Off the Street. Why Won’t Insurance Companies Cover Them?” for KQED News.

Erica Hellerstein (’14) won for best Tech Reporting for her unforgettable story, “Silicon Savanna: The workers taking on Africa’s digital sweatshops” for Coda. The story offers a close look at court battles in Kenya about using social media content moderators from across the African continent to review material in their native languages for multinational tech firms.

Stephen Hobbs (’14) won for best Non-Deadline Reporting (Circulation up to 40,000) for his investigation “The Final Fall,” which looked into a California skydiving center where at least 28 people have died. A colleague and he combed through news stories, death investigations and federal records to come up with that total. They also scoured court filings, business records and federal and state laws to explore how the center was still in business despite its history.

“60 Minutes” Correspondent Bill Whitaker (’78/’16) won for best Arts, Entertainment and Fashion Journalism for his story “The Heritage War,” on a network of cultural warriors in Ukraine building the case against Russian forces for targeting churches, libraries, and looting the country’s most important museums. And while plunder is as old as war itself, Ukrainian investigators say this is different. They see a campaign of cultural genocide to destroy Ukraine’s identity as a nation. Whitaker joined them on the frontlines.

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About the Winners

April Dembosky is the health correspondent for the NPR station in San Francisco, KQED Public Radio, where her stories air locally, statewide and nationally. She specializes in covering altered states of mind, from postpartum depression to methamphetamine-induced psychosis to schizophrenia. Her investigative series about insurance companies sidestepping mental health laws won multiple awards, including first place in beat reporting from the National Association of Health Care Journalists.

She is the recipient of numerous other prizes and fellowships, including a national Edward R. Murrow award for investigative reporting, multiple Society of Professional Journalists awards for long-form storytelling, investigative reporting, and science reporting, and a Carter Center Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism.

Dembosky reported and produced Soundtrack of Silence, an audio documentary about music and memory that is currently being made into a feature film by Paramount Pictures, produced by Channing Tatum, screenplay by Jamie Linden. Before joining KQED in 2013, Dembosky was a staff writer covering technology and Silicon Valley for The Financial Times of London, and before that, she contributed business and arts stories to The New York Times and Marketplace. She got her undergraduate degree in philosophy and French studies from Smith College. She is a classically trained violinist and proud alum of the first symphony orchestra at Burning Man.

Erica Hellerstein is an award-winning investigative journalist and feature writer based in the Bay Area. She has covered global human rights issues for more than a decade, reporting on-the-ground throughout the United States, Latin America, Africa, and Europe. She is currently a senior labor and economics reporter with the Bay Area-based newsroom El Tímpano. Her work has been published in The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic, among other outlets, and has earned honors from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Society of Environmental Journalists, the Online News Association and the San Francisco Press Club.

Stephen Hobbs is an enterprise reporter for The Sacramento Bee. He has worked for newspapers in Colorado, Florida and South Carolina. His reporting with colleagues has earned him a Pulitzer Prize and other national honors including: Scripps Howard Awards, a Eugene S. Pulliam First Amendment Award, an Investigative Reporters & Editors Award and National Headliner Awards.

Bill Whitaker is an award-winning journalist and “60 Minutes” correspondent who has covered major news stories, domestically and across the globe, for more than four decades with CBS News. He joined 60 Minutes in 2014 and the 2023-24 season is his 10th on the broadcast. Whitaker first arrived at CBS News as a reporter in 1984. He has been honored with multiple journalism awards, including two Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards (2023, 2017), a Peabody Award (2018), the RTDNA’s highest honor, the Paul White Award for career achievement (2018) and numerous Emmy Awards.