The Connecticut Mirror honored with 12 awards at press convention
The Connecticut Mirror was honored at the 2020 NENPA convention.
The Connecticut Mirror was honored with a number of awards at the New England Newspaper & Press Association’s recent annual convention, including a first-place award for its coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic and seven other first-place awards.
The awards, announced earlier this month, went to stories published from August 2019 through July 2020.
“I am very proud of our staff and gratified that their hard work is so well recognized,” said Executive Editor Elizabeth Hamilton. “The COVID pandemic was especially challenging to cover, as it involved a complete reshuffling of the newsroom to respond to a crisis we never could have imagined and challenged us to provide a deeper level of service to our readers.”
The Education Writers Association announced this week that the “Invisible Walls” series, by the Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica, won first place in its National Awards for Education Reporting in the Investigative Reporting (Smaller Newsroom) category. EWA also named a series of stories by ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune examining how the pandemic exposed inequities in education as a finalist in the News (Large Newsroom) category. The awards competition recognizes the top education journalism across the country.
“Invisible Walls,” a project of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Connecticut Mirror, investigated the connection between long-standing systemic housing and school segregation in Connecticut. Reporter Jacqueline Rabe Thomas’ expertise in education reporting allowed her to quickly grasp how some towns used lucrative local contracts for school board legal work to pressure law firms to abandon affordable housing clients. In another exa