CalMatters wins for general excellence in Online Journalism Awards

CalMatters was named the best medium-sized newsroom in the 2025 Online Journalism Awards. CalMatters’ new Director of Product Andrew Losowsky won the association’s Impact Award. The honors were announced Friday at the Online News Association awards ceremony in New Orleans.

In addition, one of CalMatters’ board members, Robert Hernandez, was honored with the Rich Jaroslovsky Founder’s Award.

First Place, General Excellence

CalMatters won first place for general excellence among medium-sized newsrooms. 

Judges said they “chose to honor the innovative Digital Democracy project and the comprehensive multi-platform Voter Guide, recognizing a winner that fully meets the criteria for general excellence. These useful, hands-on tools and their stories that led to real-world impact stood out as fulfilling their mission to demystify California government.”

Neil Chase, CEO, accepted the award for CalMatters and said, “It is deeply meaningful to be cited for this work by people who know better than anybody else what we do and why it matters. I’m accepting this on behalf of the 80 people at CalMatters and all the other folks who work with us: the partners we have around California, around the country — a number of whom are in this room — the broadcasters and news organizations in California who help us get this news out to people.”

Here are some highlights of CalMatters’ work over the past year:

• Our stories and tools made government actions and decisions relatable, held leaders accountable and gave Californians vital information to engage with their government – resulting in impact felt across the state. In journalism, impact can take seconds or it can take years. When it comes to big issues we bring persistent, accountability coverage, and this year, we’ve seen that result in widespread impact: a California state audit (triggered by a 2023 CalMatters investigation) found that a law meant to reveal who funds state legislators’ sponsored travel is falling short, state legislators advanced a new bill to increase homeless shelter oversight (directly citing an ongoing CalMatters investigation on conditions inside homeless shelters), and California’s political watchdog fined a former lawmaker $106,000 for campaign finance violations (after a 2020 CalMatters story). This is only a fraction of the impact we’ve had.
• Our Voter Guide has been a powerhouse resource that has helped Californians figure out how they want to vote. In 2024, we reached our widest audience thus far, by meeting voters where they were. We created TikTok videos and filters, launched an interactive ballot preview tool, partnered with local publications to show readers articles relevant to their ballot, created magazine-style quizzes that hundreds of Californians used at 40+ in-person events, printed a Voter Guide zine, added Chinese and Korean translations in addition to Spanish, and a version for English learners. One in five California voters used our guide.
• Our Digital Democracy platform, launched in 2024, shows video and transcripts from every hearing, logs every vote, provides data on lobbyists and an easy way to track bills. We’ve also trained journalists in 20+ newsrooms on how to use our AI-generated tipsheets. With the help of our tipsheets, CBS News partnered with us to reveal that California’s one-party supermajority legislature systematically avoids transparency and accountability by killing controversial legislation without voting on the record. Digital Democracy has been awarded an Emmy and won the Poynter Institute’s Punch Sulzberger Prize for Journalism Innovation.

Congratulations to finalists ProPublica, Mother Jones/Center for Investigative Reporting and The Texas Tribune.

CalMatters was a finalist in the same category of general excellence among medium-sized newsrooms last year, won by ProPublica. The Markup, now part of CalMatters, won the award last year among small-sized newsrooms.

Finalist, Social Media Engagement

CalMatters was a finalist for excellence in social media engagement among medium-sized newsrooms.

Last year, CalMatters used TikTok to share nonpartisan Voter Guide information and to meet younger voters where they are:

• Made-for-Gen Z TikToks: We experimented a lot, failing multiple times before we found our first viral success when we started breaking down California propositions using a call center format. We created skits where a reporter played both a confused voter and a call center prop expert. TikTokers started paying attention, and we kept going, making and trying out organic ways to reach young voters on TikTok.
• Launching our own TikTok filter: Like in previous elections, we created online interactive quizzes that helped California voters figure out where they stood on each of the statewide propositions. But in 2024, after being inspired by lighthearted beauty industry TikTok filters that asked viewers to vote for makeup by tilting their heads, we created a series of CalMatters TikTok filters asking you if you thought the rent was too damn high — and other similar questions — that could help TikTokers decide how they’d vote on the state’s ballot propositions this year. (Our demo.) Our quiz filters were used over 20,000 times in the two weeks before the election.
• Working with California influencers: For the first time ever, CalMatters worked with influencers to help make sure our voter guide reached young voters on TikTok. We selected six influencers based on common criteria — they were in California, they normally posted lifestyle videos, and they thought of young adults as one of their main audiences. We also asked them to clearly disclose that CalMatters was sponsoring their post, to create videos in their own voice, and to tell their audience about our voter guide.

Congratulations to The Marshall Project, who won, and our fellow finalists, National Geographic and The Baltimore Banner. This is CalMatters’ first honor in the excellence in social media category.

Impact Award

CalMatters’ new Director of Product Andrew Losowsky won this year’s ONA Impact Award. The honor is for “a trailblazing individual whose work in digital journalism and dedication to innovation exhibits a substantial impact on the industry, regardless of their tenure in journalism.”

Rodney Gibbs, an ONA board member, presented the award and said, “Andrew’s work on developing The Coral Project … brought the comment section into the modern era, and it created a system that dozens of sites still use today. …[Now] in his new role at CalMatters, he’s bringing that organization’s award-winning journalism to a broader audience, and through development of tools and processes, he is helping to give Californians more agency and more access to what’s going on inside their state.”

Accepting the award, Losowsky said, “True impact occurs when journalism improves the lives of the communities it serves. … A real community is a lot more than an audience. Communities are groups of people who engage, interact and support each other. Communities are how we build trust, how we create common knowledge, how we share our humanity, how we feel less alone.”

He continued, discussing recent attacks on independent journalism, “For our industry, for this nation, for every single one of us in this room and out there, if and when [targeted attacks on individuals and journalists] come, I look forward to us standing strong, in community, together.”

Before joining CalMatters, Losowsky was the founding head of Coral, a community platform used by more than 500 major news websites in 28 countries. He ran Coral for ten years, managing its acquisition by Vox Media, and overseeing community strategy across the organization.

Losowsky is the co-creator of Perspectives, a project that helps journalists find inspiration from a broader range of work and practice, and generates connections with experts in other industries. He is also an advisor to Documented, and a founding member of the News Product Alliance.

Jaroslovsky Founder’s Award

The award, bestowed on CalMatters’ board member Robert Hernandez, is for someone who “has significantly advanced or made lasting contributions to the field of digital journalism through their work in the industry, and who exhibits extraordinary commitment to the mission, value and vision of ONA.”

Hernandez is a professor of professional practice at USC Annenberg who focuses on exploring and developing the intersection of technology and journalism. His work emphasizes empowering people through informative reporting and storytelling, community engagement, growing content distribution models, and supporting journalism financially.

Accepting the award, Hernandez said, “Despite my chaos muppet energy, they gave me this award. I am a misfit that often feels out of place, but I’ve been a blessed misfit where people have looked out for me. They welcomed me to places and that really shaped me.”

Hernandez reflected on how he has learned over his career that whenever he’s in the room where decisions are happening, he has the daunting responsibility to have the courage to speak up, and that journalists have the responsibility to speak up.

“You have to speak up and challenge each other with love and respect,” Hernandez said. “Use your voice, no matter how shaky it may sound.”

Sisi Wei, chief impact officer of CalMatters and The Markup, shared that she has known Hernandez since  she was a journalism student trying to narrow down her interests.

“He was so supportive of journalism students everywhere, not simply those who had the pleasure of taking his classes,” Wei said. “He wanted everyone to experiment, to get opportunities, to push themselves, and to push the industry. And through his own work, he did just that. And he did it in a way that included and elevated his students.”