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FREE SPEECH & OPEN
GOVERNMENT AWARD
Past Winners
The honorees are: Thadeus Greenson of the North Coast Journal; Al-Amyn Sumar and David McCabe of The New York Times and Leah Nylen of Bloomberg; and nonprofit, collaborative news platform MuckRock.
The honorees are: Laurence Du Sault for her reporting on Police Dept. investigations into officer caused deaths; Samantha Hogan for her reporting on of six Maine jails recording inmate/attorney calls; and Fred Schulte for uncovering vast overpayments to Medicaid Advantage insurance companies.
The honorees are: Matt Drange, for reporting on tech companies’ non-disclosure agreements; Voice of San Diego for its series “Year One: COVID-19’s Death Toll;” and Sukey Lewis and Sandhya Dirks for their police transparency reporting
The Brown Institute for Media Innovation is the FAC Award recipient for “Documenting COVID-19”, which created a massive clearinghouse of public records in partnership with 30 newsrooms.
The California Reporting Project is the recipient of the 2019 Free Speech & Open Government Award, given in recognition of the project’s groundbreaking statewide campaign to bring to light records of police misconduct.
The nonprofit newsroom ProPublica received FAC’s 2018 Free Speech & Open Government Award for its extensive use of public records to increase transparency around political appointees at the highest levels of government.
The 2017 Free Speech & Open Government Award went to Dave Maass and Jennifer Lynch of EFF and Peter Bibring of ACLU-SC, for their joint work to bring accountability and transparency to police use of automated license plate readers.
Winners this year are Thomas Peele, an investigative reporter who used public records requests to build a database of weapons lost by or stolen from CA police, and Carolyn Titus of the Ferndale Enterprise, who battled the County Fair Association over disclosure of financial records.
This year’s winners are the Monterey County Weekly and citizen activist Bill Branch. The first honored for upholding the finest traditions of community journalism and the second by demonstrating the effectiveness of citizen activism in holding officials accountable.
Sacramento Bee investigative reporter Charles Piller for investigative reporting, and Chris Murphy and Christina Selder, founders of CARR (Consumer Advocates for Residential Care Facility Reform) for effective use of government data and the internet in advocacy work.