We are excited to share that CALmatters has won the prestigious EPPY award for our California election guide.

The guide was recognized as the Best Innovation Project on a website with under 1 million pageviews a month.

Given by the Editor & Publisher magazine, the EPPY awards are intended to honor the best in digital media. The magazine’s staff recruited 49 judges this year to choose winners in 30 categories.

The CALmatters newsroom, which put in months of hard work into the guide,  is thrilled to receive this recognition. “Every election year, news organizations face the big challenge of how to engage readers, viewers and listeners in what many citizens consider boring, even irrelevant to their daily lives: midterm elections,” said CALmatters Publisher Marcia Parker. “Traditional voter guides, information-packed as they are, don’t always help. This year, CALmatters set out to make the races and propositions accessible and meaningful with a unique approach. We positioned voters as the hiring committee evaluating candidates for the top jobs in state government.”

The election guide is a nonpartisan resource that comprehensively explains the propositions you’ll see at the state level on the ballot, reviews candidates for statewide offices and covers critical races. It is designed to deliver all the information voters need as they prepare to head to the polls. In addition to articles about the arguments and endorsements on each side, this guide also has an interactive ballot guide as well as an explainer video series. There’s also a fun interactive Gimme Props game. If you haven’t visited it yet, do check it out here.

It’s been a good year for CALmatters. We recently won an award from the Online News Association for our housing explainer. Read more on that here.

We want to hear from you

Want to submit a guest commentary or reaction to an article we wrote? You can find our submission guidelines here. Please contact CalMatters with any commentary questions: commentary@calmatters.org

Marcia Parker was Publisher and COO of CalMatters from 2017 through mid-2022.