From top left: Tarini Mehta (’24), Steve Fisher (’14), Kathleen Quinn (’24), Julietta Bisharyan (’23), Katie Rodriguez (’23), Susie Neilson (’19), Aaron Leathley (’21), Tanay Gokhale (’23) and Betty Márquez Rosales (’20).
Nineteen UC Berkeley Journalism alums have been honored with 2025 California Journalism Awards from the California News Publishers Association for excellent reporting, photography, multimedia and design in print and online publications across the state.
Four of the winners, Saumya Gupta (‘24), Simmerdeep Kaur (’24), Tarini Mehta (’24) and Kathleen Quinn (’24), graduated just two years ago and are already making their mark in the broad California media landscape from rural northern Napa County to Los Angeles and beyond, reflecting Berkeley Journalism’s commitment to bolster local journalism in the public interest.
“Our alumni are journalism leaders, whether it be in the C-suite or on the front lines of investigative and community reporting,” said Michael D. Bolden, dean of UC Berkeley Journalism. “Their excellent work provides residents with the news and information they need to make important decisions about their lives and to thrive in our society.”
Susie Neilson (’19) won First Place in the Division 1 Investigative Reporting category for “Burned,” published by the San Francisco Chronicle, with colleagues Megan Fan Munce and Sara DiNatale. The multi-part investigation penetrated the systems insurance companies use to underpay policyholders. Drawing on hundreds of confidential documents and dozens of whistleblower accounts, reporters found that insurance giants like State Farm use faulty algorithms, hidden rules and experts with conflicts of interest to limit payouts to their policyholders after disasters, with little pushback from California regulators.
Launched months before historic fires devastated Los Angeles, the Chronicle’s series exhaustively revealed the practices that leave survivors unable to rebuild or living in damaged homes. Beyond exposé, the stories became a critical utility for California policyholders and lawmakers navigating fallout from the L.A. fires.
The series also won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting.
Los Angeles Times Special Correspondent Steve Fisher (’14) won First Place in the Writing category for his story “Gold, Guns and Cartels: The Battle for a Billion-Dollar Mine.” Based on government documents and extensive interviews with U.S. and Mexican government officials and mine workers, the story centers around a gold mine in Mexico that was taken over by the sons of the drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
The Los Angeles Times story deck highlighted how Mexican officials and generals said they would help an American businessman reclaim the mine, but they demanded hefty bribes. And that for one man, reclaiming the mine was more than a business proposition. It was a reckoning with his past and a chance to pay back the orphanage that raised him, the paper said.
Tarini Mehta (’24), a California Local News Fellow, won First Place in Division 2 for Coverage of Youth and Education for a series of stories in The Press Democrat that she reported over six months about a 50-student single-school district tucked away in rural northern Napa County. Mehta reported on an unpopular leader, mass resignations, an attendance boycott and a group of children who were failed by the Pope Valley Union public schools in Napa.
Semantha Raquel Norris 📸 Kori Suzuki (’23)
Another series she wrote about a massive email campaign attempting to pressure Sonoma State University into cancelling a Palestinian American scholar’s talk during the annual Holocaust and Genocide Lecture Series won Third Place in the Social Justice and Civic Engagement Division 2 category.
Modesto Bee reporter and California Local News Fellow Kathleen Quinn (’24) won the Environmental Reporting Division 3 category for “Stanislaus County Water: small systems, private wells, contaminants” and fellow Modesto Bee reporter Julietta Bisharyan (’23) won the Social Justice and Civic Engagement Division 3 category for “City’s anti-mask-ordinance draws public outrage and potential lawsuit.”
Monterey County Weekly reporter and photojournalist Katie Rodriguez (’23), a California Local News Fellow, won First Place in the Division 4 Breaking News category for her coverage of a fatal shark attack at Lovers Point in December 2025.
California Local News Fellow Semantha Raquel Norris (’22) won First Place in the Division 6 News Photo category for “Burning Waymo”: Waymo Suspends Downtown LA Service After Self-Driving Cars Torched and the Feature Photo category for, “Garden Hose”: Scenes from the Fires in Los Angeles, for The San Fernando Valley Sun/el Sol.
Waymo on fire in Downtown LA Jun. 08 (SFVS/el Sol Photo/Semantha Raquel Norris)
An Altadena resident battles flames from the Eaton Fire as they overtake a neighbor’s home. (SFVS/el Sol Photo/Semantha Raquel Norris)
Aaron Leathley (’21) of Stocktonia won First Place in the Division 5 Investigative Reporting category for coverage of the criminal case against a Stockton Unified school trustee, including an investigation of the search warrant in the case, which found almost none of the original claims in the search warrant affidavit had been proved true.
Leqi Zhong (’23)
Leathley also won Second Place in the In-Depth Reporting category for an investigation into Stockton’s project to refurbish an existing pair of office towers as a new City Hall uncovered arcane rules that allow many cost overruns in city contracts to be hidden from public scrutiny.
Leqi Zhong (’23), Clovis enterprise/accountability reporter at The Fresno Bee, won First Place in the Division 3 Coverage of Youth and Education category for an investigation into gender inequity in dress code enforcement by Clovis Unified schools.
Betty Márquez Rosales (’20) won Second Place in the Immigration Reporting category for Division 3 for “A student deported and a summer of raids leave a school reeling,” for EdSource. The story describes how the deportation of a classmate impacted a school that sits in the middle of a small cluster of predominantly working-class Latino cities with large immigrant populations in southeast Los Angeles County. Those cities were thrust into the center of intense immigration enforcement activity last summer as immigrants and citizens alike were intimidated, arrested and tear gassed.
In the span of one week, Kristi Noem, then-secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, brought a film crew to an immigration raid at the home of a pregnant U.S. citizen, videos surfaced of violent arrests by immigration agents at the local Home Depot and car washes, people were tear-gassed as they watched ICE agents arrest a teenage U.S. citizen, agents arrested an aspiring Marine and armored military vehicles drove along main street intersections. One student told Márquez Rosales, “I feel scared and threatened every day of my life.”
From top left: Yesica Prado (’18), Cynthia Dizikes (’08), Karen D’Souza (’95), Saumya Gupta (‘24) Robin Urevich (’09), Joaquin Palomino (’15) and Snigdha Sen (‘05).
Robin Urevich (’09) won Second Place in the Division 4 Investigative Reporting category for “Locked Out: How Some of Los Angeles’ Biggest Landlords Leave Section 8 Tenants Behind,” for Capital & Main. In this multipart investigation of some of the biggest landlords in Los Angeles, Urevich revealed apparent widespread violations of fair-housing laws that are supposed to prevent discrimination against low-income tenants who rely on rental assistance. The series also won Second Place in the In-Depth Reporting and Coverage of Local Government categories.
Saumya Gupta’s (‘24) coverage of the Pasadena Unified School District for Local News Pasadena earned Second Place in the Division 7 Coverage of Youth and Education category. Read it here.
Simmerdeep Kaur (’24) won Second Place in the Enterprise News Story or Series category for her reporting on how USDA funding cuts under the Trump administration led to the loss of more than 630,000 pounds of food across San Mateo and Santa Clara counties in just five months, for The Redwood City Pulse.
Simmerdeep Kaur (’24)
She also won Second Place in the Wildfire Feature category for telling the story of a global nonprofit that organized an emergency flight to relocate 48 pets, helping them find new homes while easing the burden on overwhelmed animal shelters in the greater Los Angeles area after the devastating LA wildfires. She credits Florence Middleton (’24) for taking the incredible photographs that brought the story to life.
Cynthia Dizikes (’08) and Joaquin Palomino (’15) won Fourth Place in the Division 1 Public Service Journalism category for “Failed to Death,” a four-part investigation in the San Francisco Chronicle that exposed how for-profit psychiatric hospitals rapidly expanded across California and reaped millions in profit by stripping their workforces bare and subjecting patients to woeful care, violence and deadly neglect. Palomino and Dizikes built their own dataset from hundreds of deficiency reports, county citations and 911 call narratives culled from police agencies. They traveled statewide to interview overwhelmed workers and traumatized patients who described arriving at these facilities seeking recovery, only to endure more pain.
The series was also a 2026 Pulitzer Prize finalist in the Investigative Reporting category.
Yesica Prado (’18) received 5th Place in the Investigative Reporting Division 6 category for an examination of San Francisco’s efforts to displace families living in recreational vehicles, for the bilingual nonprofit newsroom El Tecolote. Over more than a year, journalists Prado, Pablo Unzueta, Erika Carlos and Mariana Durán combined their extensive reporting with a review of thousands of pages of public records to show how parking restrictions, construction projects and political pressure were used to repeatedly displace primarily working-class, immigrant and Latino families.
The reporting helped shift the public framing of RV residents from “blight” to neighbors facing displacement, while exposing the failures of enforcement-first policies, explaining how legislation would impact people’s daily lives and prompting a city investigation into allegations that a city worker sold RV parking permits for cash.
Tanay Gokhale (’23), a California Local News Fellow, won Fourth Place in the Investigative Reporting Division 7 category for “Scars of Migration,” a three-part India Currents series examining the growing phenomenon of undocumented Indians crossing the U.S. border. The series delves into the mental, physical, health and cultural challenges these migrants face at the U.S. border, barriers to resources and the grassroots groups that advocate for them.
Karen D’Souza (’95) won Fourth Place in the Division 6 In-Depth Reporting category for her EdSource story, “Inside transitional kindergarten: Where play, curiosity and early learning meet” (part 1 of 3).
Snigdha Sen (‘05) won Fourth Place in the Health Reporting Division 7 category for the series Caring Across Generations: Aging & Health in Desi Families for “Family Caregiving Can Get Lonely – It Doesn’t Have To Be,” in India Currents.
California Local News Fellow Winners
A number of journalists from the UC Berkeley Journalism-based California Local News Fellowship, a program that just received renewed funding from California lawmakers, were also recognized with CJA awards.
From top left: Niva Ashkenazi. Hannah Bensen, Elsa Cavazos, Shaylee Guadalupe Navarro and Mariana Durán.
Mariana Durán of El Tecolote won four awards, including Second Place in the Public Service Journalism category for her investigation into Artri Ajo King, a supplement containing hidden ingredients linked to serious health problems; Third Place in the Immigration Reporting category for “‘She’s my home’: An S.F. couple’s life unraveled after one ICE check-in“; a Community Focus Award for a series on public health and wellness for Latina immigrant mothers, and Fifth Place in the Investigative Reporting Division 6 category (listed above with alum Yesica Prado) for San Francisco’s efforts to displace families living in recreational vehicles.
Hannah Bensen of Palo Alto Online, won First Place in the Transportation Reporting category for her reporting on Waymo cars crowding a quiet residential street in Palo Alto during the company’s rollout of its self-driving vehicles and Third Place in the Labor Reporting category for her story on Stanford University layoffs.
Niva Ashkenazi of J. The Jewish News of Northern California, won Third Place in the Religion and Faith Writing category for “Rabbis who took psychedelics for study describe ‘profound,’ spiritual experiences” and Fourth Place in the Feature Story category for the story “How Humboldt’s campus protests became a social minefield for Jews.”
Shaylee Guadalupe Navarro of Stocktonia won First Place in the Immigration Watchdog Reporting category for a series on the ripple effects of the national immigration crackdown in Stockton, a collection of reporting and photography on 2025’s national immigration crackdown and the ripple effects in the Stockton community. One showcase story revealed a statewide shift in which more migrants were summoned to mandatory but seemingly routine meetings to discuss their immigration cases — meetings that turned into arrests.
Elsa Cavazos won Second Place in the Fine Arts Writing category in Division 2 for a Press Democrat story about a poetry movement in Napa Valley, started by two young poets who care about their community and have created a family from their open mic events. Cavazos also won Third Place in the Wildfire News Coverage category for a story on how the Pickett Fire in Napa underscored progress in Spanish-language emergency updates — but gaps remain.
California Local News Fellow Yucheng Tang, a bilingual journalist from eastern China who recently completed an MFA in non-fiction writing at NYU.
Yucheng Tang won Fourth Place in the Division 7 Enterprise Reporting category for a three-part series on the fire that destroyed Bidwell Mansion, a local landmark from the 1800s associated with the founding of Chico through the acquisition of Mexican land grants where the city would be established, and the role it played in the community, in ChicoSol. After the fire, discussions around settler-centered narratives and the controversial relationship between Bidwell and the Native Americans who lived in the area resurfaced, drawing both local and international attention.
Tang also won Fifth Place in the Homelessness Reporting category for a story on embedding with a Point-in-Time count in Butte County, and Fifth Place in the In-Depth Reporting category for a story on the Butte County Mental Health Diversion court. He also won Fifth Place in the Video Journalism category for a story on a Ukrainian delegation’s visit to learn about Camp Fire recovery, including a special performance by the Paradise symphony.
