Zenger House has announced its twelve 2025 awards for ground-level reporting. The winning stories are all excellent, but none emerged primarily from the ground-level reporting of local journalists.
I chair Zenger House and am one of the five judges of the prizes, now in their fourth year. As opposed to the Pulitzer Prizes that will be announced a month from now, Zenger House has a bias toward localism and also toward stories in Christian publications, but we judge all such articles in comparison with those published in the secular big boys. (While we don’t honor stories that are explicitly hostile to Christianity, God doesn’t need our public relations.)
This year the big boys dominated. Five of the stories arrived under the auspices of the two Manhattan giants, the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. For example, Gabriele Steinhauser and Mohamed Zakaria won for their great Dec. 31 Wall Street Journal account of “The Heroic Race to Rescue 370 Orphans from a War Zone—Twice.” Amid intense conflict in Sudan, doctors, aid workers, and volunteers initiated a desperate rescue operation for the 370 children in an orphanage.
One Zenger Prize did go to an article in probably the best-known state-level publication, Texas Monthly. Jack Herrera won for “The Border Crisis Won’t Be Solved at the Border,” which shows how U.S.–Mexico border issues emerge from economic dependencies and political motivations, not just security concerns.
Rick Jervis, Chris Kenning, and Johnny Casey of USA Today and the Asheville Citizen-Times wrote the one Zenger winner with local newspaper involvement: “Heroes and Heartbreak” showed how Hurricane Helene led to catastrophic flooding, landslides, and numerous rescues in western North Carolina, with local firefighters and volunteers braving rising waters to save lives—and some succumbing.
The Zenger House website also has links to past winners including Tim Alberta, Deirdre Fernandes, Andrei Kurkov, San Quinones, Eli Saslow, Clint Smith, Kevin Williamson, and whistleblower Amelia Knisely. Most of their articles also appeared in big publications. We’re looking for more nominees of local articles with beckoning headlines such as this one in the Flatwater Free Press (Nebraska): “They survived the jungle to seek asylum. Now Afghans in Nebraska fear deportation.”
Zenger Prizes take their name from John Peter Zenger, editor of a small 1730s newspaper, the New York Journal. He published articles showing that the royal governor, William Cosby, was taking bribes and stealing. Cosby threw him in jail and charged him with seditious libel, but jurors sided with Zenger.
Zenger House judges could use the help of Front Porch Republic readers in finding stories from small, local publications. The Zenger House website displays work from the forty winners from 2022 through 2025 and includes a 13-minute video with this year’s winners. A form at the website allows readers to nominate articles—but they have to be impressively reported and written to make it onto the long list from which judges plan to choose a dozen winners for the next set of awards.
The Brass Spittoon will be running an interview soon that provides background on Zenger and spotlights ways to improve local journalism.
Image Via: GetArchive
