Chalkbeat Colorado wins five regional journalism awards

Chalkbeat Colorado won three first place prizes in a regional journalism competition Friday including an award for its coverage of Denver’s struggling Manual High School.

Other top honors were awarded for an investigation into the email habits of the Jefferson County school board, and continuous coverage of education legislation during the 2014 Colorado General Assembly.

The education news nonprofit also won two third place awards in the Top of the Rockies, a regional journalism competition hosted by the Colorado Society of Professional Journalists, for its website and coverage of a controversial proposal to review an advanced U.S. history course in Jeffco.

Chalkbeat, which publishes only online, competed against newspapers with print distributions between 30,000 and 75,000. Those news organizations include the Colorado Spring Gazette, the Colorado Springs Independent, and the Boulder Weekly.

The Top of the Rockies honors news organizations in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico.

Here’s the full list of awards Chalkbeat won:

  • First Place,  Enterprise Education Reporting: A promise unfilled at Manual High School, by Kate Schimel and Nicholas Garcia
  • First Place, Investigative Reporting: Witt’s missing emails point to possible flaws in Jeffco policy, state open records laws, by Nicholas Garcia
  • First Place, Political Reporting: Education at the ‘Leg 2014 (including this story), by Todd Engdahl
  • Third Place, General Education Reporting: #JeffcoSchoolBoardHistory (including this story), by Nicholas Garcia
  • Third Place, overall website, staff

Other education stories from around Colorado to receive honors included Westword’s feature on how Denver Public Schools uses the mutual consent law and the Denver Business Journal’s look at Colorado’s higher education “paradox.”