The Arizona Newspapers Association recognized AZCIR’s reporting over the past year with top honors at this past weekend’s 2016 Better Newspaper Contest. In addition to being awarded second place for overall community service and journalistic achievement for daily news organizations with less than 25,000 circulation, the Center took home four individual awards.
Evan Wyloge’s report on text messages between sitting corporation commissioners, candidates for two open seats on the commission, their campaign manager and the leader of a “dark money” group that spent to help the candidates earned a first place award in the news category.
The two-part investigation into a toxic mine spill in an agricultural region of northern Mexico, by Valeria Fernández, Sean Logan and Brandon Quester, earned both the first place multimedia storytelling and the second place enterprise reporting awards. Justin Price’s analysis of state lobbying records, which revealed that only $1 of every $8 spent by lobbyists in 2015 came with disclosure of who benefitted, won third place in the investigative reporting category.