The San Diego Sun won 17 writing excellence awards in the local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists’ 2026 Area Journalism Contest.
The SPJ held its awards ceremony on June 25 at Riverwalk Golf Course.
The disproportionately high number of accolades for a small news outlet like The Sun included 6 first place awards, 10 second places and one third place.
The Sun is a four-year-old, nonprofit newsroom that exclusively covers stories in downtown San Diego and is run as a solopreneur effort.
Included as Sun award winners are downtowner Deanna Ratnikova, a brand-new columnist who writes a “Walking In The City” column, and three former interns, all from San Diego State University. Madison Geering and Josh Silla co-authored a first-place-winning Investigative/Enterprise story and Calista Stocker took second in the category.
Much of the satisfaction I have for The Sun winning 17 awards in one contest is the variety of categories we entered. Along with the interns’ Investigative/Enterprise story, I took first place for stories about News, Politics, Business, Housing/Development and Housing Security.
The Sun was named the second-best Digital News Site. We also won second-place awards for a Nonprofit Voices Series, as well as Breaking News, Government, Criminal Justice, Education, Profile and Opinion/Editorial. The third place was in the Feature (Serious) category.
As founder of The Sun, I’m ecstatic about these results and plan to use them to market the quality of the site as well as seek future grant funding. The awards legitimize that we are meeting our mission to inform readers about important issues.
As editor of The Sun, I can’t help but feel slightly cringy about touting editorial achievements. We don’t set out to write award-winning stories. Our goal is to find stories that are meaningful and impactful to the community and connect readers to critical issues.
Congratulations to all the journalists and editors at San Diego newsrooms who participated in the SPJ contest. All of us have been impacted by financial forces that have quashed budgets and depleted ranks.
A special shoutout to SPJ Journalist of the Year Kate Morrissey, co-founder of the up-and-coming Daylight San Diego.
In her victory speech, Morrissey acknowledged that every story isn’t going to win an award, move mountains or necessarily change policy. But almost every effort does positively touch at least one person or some organization.
As a writer, any small impact is motivational. It can inspire a journalist to keep seeking out stories, investigating injustices and challenging powerful entities.
Awards acknowledge industry achievement. They’re great benchmarks. But even in a shrinking workforce, there are far more journalists putting out laudable, honest efforts than there are award plaques available to hand out. SDSun
