CalMatters named finalist for general excellence and social media in national Online Journalism Awards

CalMatters is a finalist for general excellence and social media engagement amongst medium-sized newsrooms in the 2025 Online News Awards.

In each size category, ONA’s general excellence award “honors a digitally focused news organization that successfully fulfills its editorial mission, effectively serves its audience, maximizes the use of digital tools and platforms and represents the highest journalistic standards.”

CalMatters is a finalist for general excellence along with ProPublica, Mother Jones/Center for Investigative Reporting and The Texas Tribune. CalMatters’ honor is for our nonpartisan voter information efforts, groundbreaking Digital Democracy platform and every day coverage helping millions of people make sense of California and how its government works.

• 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 impacts 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. This year, 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 two Emmy nominations and won the Poynter Institute’s Punch Sulzberger Prize for Journalism Innovation.  

CalMatters is a finalist for social media engagement among National Geographic, The Marshall Project and The Baltimore Banner. CalMatters’ honor is for our nonpartisan Voter Guide TikTok engagement efforts.

• 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. Our Gen Z politics reporter, Jenna Peterson, and our millennial audience engagement manager, Anna Almendrala worked hand-in-hand, creating skits where Jenna 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.

While some winners in the Online News Awards have already been announced, winners for general excellence and social media engagement will be announced in September at the Online News Association’s conference in New Orleans.

Last year, CalMatters was also a finalist for general excellence; and The Markup, which is also part of our news organization, won the same category for small newsrooms.