Asheville Citizen Times journalists were honored Sept. 19 with three awards during the 151st North Carolina Press Association annual convention in Raleigh.
NCPA members were honored for excellence in news and advertising coverage. The peer-reviewed contest is one of the largest in the nation with over 4,000 entries submitted by more than 125 newspapers and news organizations, according to the NCPA.
Citizen Times City Reporter Sarah Honosky won a first-place award and Investigative Reporter Joel Burgess won two second-place awards including one he shared with Citizen Times Photographer Angela Wilhelm.
“I’m very proud of, and congratulate our newsroom staffers for their N.C. Press Association awards. The work of Joel, Angela and Sarah represent some of the best reporting in the state, and alongside their Citizen Times colleagues, work tirelessly to present Western North Carolina residents with the truth,” said Karen Chávez, Asheville Citizen Times executive editor.
“Our journalists exemplify the mission of the Citizen Times — to inform our readers through explanatory pieces, to hold those in power accountable through watchdog, accountability journalism and to help set a vision of positive change for our community.”
The Citizen Times awards are all the more impressive considering the paper competes in a division with the state's largest daily newspapers, including the Charlotte Observer, Raleigh News & Observer and Greensboro News & Record, Chávez said.
Honosky won first place for her series of intimate portraits of the lives of people experiencing homelessness in Asheville, the struggles the city faces in attempting to address this complex issue and debunking common myths about this vulnerable population.
Read the Homeless in Asheville series:
Schools, county tax assessment accountability
Burgess, who covered government, politics and investigations for the Citizen Times for 17 years, won second place in General News Reporting for his story on the yawning gap between the sales prices of Buncombe County's high-end homes and the tax-assessed values of those homes. Burgess found that sales prices averaged 92% above their tax-assessed values, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars in public subsidies to extremely wealthy homeowners.
Read: 'Hidden subsidy for rich people:' Asheville area mansions sell for 92% over tax valu e
Burgess — who earlier this month moved to another Gannett paper, USA Today — also won second place for Education Reporting, and Wilhelm for photography, in the same category for their story on unreported crimes in Asheville City Schools.
Read: Asheville City Schools crimes: weapons, rapes not reported to NC School Board?
The reporter-photographer team found that even as police were recording rapes, assaults and other violent crimes in the city's schools those crimes were not being recorded in a North Carolina system used by state education officials and legislators to set policies and where parents should be able to judge a school’s safety. The reporting led to a change in how the Asheville City School system reports crimes.
Check out more award-winning, in-depth, accountability journalism, photos and video from all Citizen Times journalists at citizentimes.com .
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Aaron Nelsen is the local news editor for the Asheville Citizen Times. His past stops include the San Antonio Express-News, where he was the Rio Grande Valley bureau chief, and for Time Magazine in Chile. He has been published in the New York Times, The Guardian, and Texas Monthly Magazine. Reach him at anelsen@citizentimes.com or follow him on twitter @amnelsen.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Asheville Citizen Times journalists honored with NC Press Association awards
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