Fellowship projects pick up SPJ awards, nods from the Emmys

Former California Endowment Health Journalism Fellows are picking up awards and nods all over the western United States this year. Here are some highlights from the award-winning reporting produced as fellowship projects:

• Leah Beth Ward, health and social services reporter at the Yakima Herald-Republic in Washington state, won first place for investigative reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists Northwest. The 2008 Excellence in Journalism competition recognized her report Hidden Wells, Dirty Water for its impact on the community. The series, also published in the Spanish-language weekly El Sol and broadcast by Spanish-language public radio station KDNA, prompted the Environmental Protection Agency to investigate the contamination of groundwater in Lower Yakima Valley.

• Fellows Sharon Salyer and Alejandro Dominguez were in the first class of CEHJF's national journalism fellows. Their fellowship project, a compelling series about mental health care among the Pacific Northwest's growing Hispanic communities, won nods from a long list of organizations: the Association of Health Care Journalists, the National Institute of Health Care Management, Mental Health America and the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) of the Pacific Northwest. Alone Among Us, published in the Daily Herald of Everett, Wa., and La Raza del Noroeste, took the top prizes for coverage of minorities in a paper with mid-range circulation and for the Daily Herald's online presentation of the story from SPJ, and the award for best series from Mental Health America. "Due to the high amount of stigma surrounding mental health issues in the Hispanic community, we did not hear from a lot of people," Salyer wrote in an email about the response to the report. "We did hear from one teen, though, who was referred to the series by her teacher. She was experiencing depression, feelings of isolation and other problems we discussed in the part two of the series and said she was really helped by reading Jordan's story."

• 2007 fellow Daisy Lin Shapiro of KNBC was the executive producer of a series of reports on health care reform in an election year, which reviewed the positions of the presidential candidates and the state of health care in the nation. She got the nod from the Los Angeles-area Emmy Awards in the category of Crime/Social Issues. The winners will be announced on August 29. "It has been interesting to see how healthcare reform efforts have developed -- no longer as a hypothetical campaign ideal but in the trenches of Congress," Shapiro write in an email. "It's very much still up in the air and meanwhile healthcare costs go up and up. There is a lot of stake here."

• Former fellow Monica Navarro of KWEX-TV in San Antonio won the Anson Jones Award in the in-depth television reporting from the Texas Medical Association for her report on diabetes and obesity.