The San Francisco Peninsula Press Club recently announced the winners of its 40th Annual Greater Bay Area Journalism Awards. The Sonoma Independent won four awards, including its first “Digital Media Overall Excellence Award.”
The Sonoma Independent’s editor Jonathan Greenberg won First Place in the political columnist category for the July 24, 2016 column, “In Bypassing Warren As VP, Clinton Raises Risk Of Losing To Trump.”
The column, which also appeared as a post on Greenberg’s Huffington Post political blog, was published on the eve of the Democratic National Convention. It warned that “Bernie Sanders’ young and independent supporters are the last voters in the world who should be taken for granted.”
The First Place political column predicted that “If a significant percentage of Bernie-backing voters reject a Clinton-Kaine ticket by not showing up to vote, or by voting for other candidates, then Hillary would lose in November. Donald Trump would become the next President of the United States of America. That would be a tragedy of historic proportions. A tragedy, in part, of Hillary Clinton’s making.”
The Sonoma Independent also won three second place awards. One was for Digital Media Overall Excellence. Another was also in the Digital Media, Columns-News/Political category for this reporter’s post-November, 2017 election, titled, “Five 2016 Election Victories that Prove Sonoma County is ALREADY Great! The column noted that local citizens rejected the national conservative trend by voting in the first women majority of Sonoma County’s Board of Supervisors in history, as well as a GMO farm moratorium, a tax to restore library hours after six years of Monday closings, a Palm Drive Hospital Board majority committed to keeping West County’s hospital open and a county-wide 70 to 23% electoral landslide for Hillary Clinton.
Jonathan Greenberg also won a Second Place Award in the category of “Digital Media, Feature Story / Light Nature, for the feature story “What I Learned from My Wise Uncle Leonard Cohen,”
This is the second consecutive year that the Sonoma Independent’s Jonathan Greenberg has won First Place for awards in Columns-News/Political digital category the Greater Bay Area Journalism competition. Last year, the winner was Greenberg’s May, 2015 column titled, “Despite Record Budget Surplus, Supervisors Refuse to Restore Library Hours.”
The story, accompanies by this MoveOn civic engagement petition signed by nearly 1,300 citizens, noted that despite a record projected budget surplus of $13 million, and an enormous $28 million four year increase in spending on prison and probation, the Supervisors refused to use the surplus funds to assist the library. “While many other County funding cutbacks that impact far fewer than 100,000 library users have been restored” the article noted, “inflation adjusted funding for libraries has actually fallen by 3% since the unprecedented hour cutback in 2011. County Library Director Brett Lear believes it would cost just $1.2 million to restore Monday hours.”
The library series in the Sonoma Independent followed two years after this reporter won also won a First Place award for “Analysis” from the Greater Bay Journalism Awards or this cover story in the The North Bay Bohemian about the library finding crisis titled, “Epic Local Government Failure Results in Closed Libraries.”