Alums Maggie Beidelman and Jackeline Luna win CCNow Award for series on fossil fuels

Maggie Beidelman and Jackeline Luna

Videographers Maggie Beidelman (’13) and Jackeline Luna (’18) of Los Angeles Times have won the award for the best multimedia journalism covering the climate crisis in the 2024 CCNow Journalism Awards.

The winners were selected from more than 1,250 entries, representing outlets around the world.

From the announcement:

California’s sunny Imperial Valley would seem a perfect spot for solar development: Amid heat waves that have scorched the region’s vegetable produce, farmers have the opportunity to turn a profit on their land, and, amid endemic Western drought, fewer farms means more water to go around. But where many see an elegant solution to climate-induced woes, others, including farmers still making the most of the Valley, see a threat.

With transportive on-the-ground reporting and stunning visuals, Sammy Roth and fellow LA Times journalists deliver a thoughtful portrait of both change that is here already and the swirling questions about change that is still to come. The story is part of an ongoing series from the LA Times examining how big shifts — prompted by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act — are playing out in western states, with focus on the tension between urban and rural communities, the potential environmental consequences of large-scale renewable projects, and the need for these changes to also address harm and inequities wrought by the energy status quo.

Watch the winning entry:

Maggie Beidelman is a former Senior Video Director for the Los Angeles Times. Before joining The Times in 2019, Beidelman helped launch AJ+, the digital media channel of Al Jazeera Media Network, where she produced the award-winning series “Untold America.”

Jackeline Luna is a former senior producer for video series at the Los Angeles Times. Before joining the Los Angeles Times, she interned for Politico, ABC7 and the Mercury News.