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Five Los Angeles Area Print and Broadcast Journalists Win National Awards For Excellence In Reporting At Ethnic Media Outlets

Posted on: Friday, 29 May 2009, 08:00 CDT

NAM Cites Journalists for Their Outstanding Reporting on Important Community Issues

LOS ANGELES, May 29 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- New America Media (NAM) announced today that five southern California journalists from ethnic news organizations won prestigious awards in NAM's national awards contest, which includes entries from ethnic media outlets across the country.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20060823/SFW081LOGO )

Sandy Close, NAM's executive director, said the award winners exemplify the quality of work performed by ethnic media outlets. Citing a new poll showing that the ethnic media in America is growing as mainstream newspapers struggle to keep readers, Ms. Close said more and more Americans are recognizing the influence of the ethnic media.

"Even as both mainstream and the ethnic media struggle to survive in difficult economic times, it's clear that the quality of work, and the ethnic media's commitment to the communities that they serve, has never been better," Ms. Close said. "The ethnic media is continuing to make an impact in urban and rural communities. The NAM award winners have demonstrated that the ethnic media is making a difference."

Here are the award winners from Southern California:

• When Claudia Nunez, of La Opinion in Los Angeles, got a phone call from a woman whose sister had disappeared, she had no idea it would lead to a nine-month investigation into human trafficking. But when she traveled to Tijuana to investigate the disappearance, she discovered that the missing woman had been the victim of a trafficking ring that conned Mexican workers into going north with the promise of jobs, only to force them into slave labor in California cities. Ms. Nunez won first place in an investigative category for a series of stories on the masterminds of the group trafficking Mexican immigrants and keeping them in virtual enslavement in California restaurants. La Opinion is a Spanish-language daily newspaper published in Los Angeles.
• "Neighborhood Watch," by Julie Ha, of the KoreAm Journal, is a story about large numbers of Koreans moving into the Los Angeles neighborhood known as Little Tokyo, one of the last "Japantowns" left in California. She describes the Japanese reaction and the community organizers who stepped in to quell the tensions. It is a delicate subject -- Japanese once colonized Korea. Her sensitive story telling won the first place award in the Race and Interethnic Relations category. The KoreAm Journal is a rapidly growing monthly magazine.
• When Californians passed Proposition 8, banning marriage between same-sex couples, Kai Ma, also of the KoreAm Journal, wondered "Where are Korean Americans in the mix?" Ms. Ma learned that while 54 percent of the Asian American Community in Los Angeles had supported Proposition 8, a whopping 72 percent of Korean community voters favored the initiative. Her story looked at how Prop 8 sparked division and debate in the Korean community which is heavily Christian and immigrant, but also has growing young, pro-gay rights demographic. There were even Korean ministers who opposed Prop 8. Her moving story earned a first place in an investigative category.
• In an investigative report into the use of underage farm workers, Vicky Gutierrez, of Telemundo, examined the May 2008 death of Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez, 17, a pregnant girl who died from heat stroke two days after collapsing in a vineyard. Ms. Gutierrez interviewed Maria Isabel's boyfriend, her uncle, and a lawyer for Merced Farm Labor, the company that employed her, investigating the claim that age was a factor in the girl's death. "We came across this little girl who was pregnant, working in the fields, who was denied a break, she was denied water and she ended up at the hospital," says Ms. Gutierrez. "When she felt ill in the field where she was working, they didn't let her family take her to the hospital, or call 911, because they knew that they would be in trouble because she was underage." Ms. Gutierrez's extraordinary reporting won in the Best Reporting on a Community Issue Category. Telemundo is a Spanish-language American television network.
• In a three-part series, "Take Care of Your Family, Protect Their Health," Norma de la Vega, formerly of Enlace San Diego, chronicled how a teacher recruited farm workers with no health insurance and little money, and set up discussions where they evolved their own strategies for overcoming cultural barriers to planned exercise and dieting. The teacher's own brother had died of obesity-related diabetes when he was barely 40. Ms. Del la Vega won first place in a healthcare category. Enlace San Diego is a Spanish-language weekly newspaper of the San Diego Union-Tribune.

The award winners will be honored at NAM's National Ethnic Media Expo & Awards on June 4-5 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia. The awards will be presented on June 4 at 6:00 pm, an event that will be co-sponsored by NAM and the University of Georgia Grady College of Journalism & Mass Communication.

"We are honored to showcase the great work being done by the ethnic media," Ms. Close said, noting that NAM will also release a poll at the gathering showing the tremendous growth of the ethnic media. "The ethnic media faces many challenges, but the ethnic media also has many accomplishments and our poll shows that people are realizing the high quality of journalism being practiced. Now, we just need for the advertisers to follow the readers."

To learn more about New America Media's National Ethnic Media EXPO & Awards, please visit http://expo.newamericamedia.org.

CONTACT: Michael K. Frisby (202) 625-4328

SOURCE New America Media

Source: PR Newswire

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