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The 30 awards for the Long Beach Post are on-par with the largest newsrooms in California in the digital contest, including 31 awards for Los Angeles Times, 23 awards for the Sacramento Bee and 15 awards for the San Francisco Chronicle.
The Post newsroom earned a total of eight first-place awards and one open-division award for best digital news photo of any publication in California for Visuals Editor Thomas Cordova.
For the first time ever, the Post also placed in the general excellence category, with judges noting the Post’s “tough-minded accountability reporting” with “informed commentary.”
Journalists Kelly Puente, Sebastian Echeverry, Valerie Osier and Alena Mashke placed first in health reporting on the pandemic for their coverage of the socioeconomic disparities of COVID-19. “The Long Beach Post provides an important public service, going behind the daily COVID-19 case counts to help readers understand the ‘why’ behind the demographic tre
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Even in a comparatively middle-class coastal neighborhood in economically ravaged Guatemala, Hernandez felt like he had no prospects. He also had no father or mother his dad having left before he was born and his mother traveling to the U.S. when he was 6 to try to find a job and send money back to her family.
Now the maras, local gangs, were breathing down Hernandez’s neck. They wanted to rope him into arms dealing and drug smuggling. He repeatedly refused.
“I told myself, if I do this, I won’t be able to live the life I want to,” Hernandez said in Spanish. “I won’t ever see my mom again.”
IN PICTURES: Looking at Long Beach through abstract photography • the Hi-lo lbpost.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from lbpost.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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The shooting was related to an earlier incident at a gas station on 7th Street and Redondo Avenue where a suspect tried to carjack a man with a gun while he was pumping gas at about 3:40 a.m., police said. The suspect fled on foot before police got there and the victim was uninjured, police spokeswoman Allison Gallagher said.
However, at about 5:25 a.m., the gunman came into the Arco and demanded money, the family that owns the gas station said.
After taking the money, about $200 in $5 bills, the gunman shot the 23-year-old clerk in the neck, according to Ahmed Shalaby, who is the son of the station’s owner. Police said the suspect again fled the scene on foot and detectives believe the two incidents are related.
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At the Long Beach Post, we have taken each challenge in stride, listening to the community in order to better serve you. Many of the projects and initiatives we announced this year were already months in the making, while other actions were born out of the demands of the community to do better.
As we reflect on the past year, we would like to take a moment to acknowledge the work we did together and the decisions we made in 2020.
Report for America
In June, two bilingual local journalists joined the newsroom to cover North and West Long Beach as part of a previously announced partnership with Report For America, which places reporters in undercovered communities across the country. Their reporting has allowed us to cover neighborhoods beyond breaking news and crime, focusing on accountability journalism and stories that bring residents together. They have also allowed the Post to serve the local Spanish-speaking community with translated and original reporting