By the Daily Post staff
The Daily Post has won 17 awards from the San Francisco Press Club including first-place honors for commentary, column, editorial, entertainment review, headlines and series of stories.
The Press Club, now in its 43rd year, drew entries from newspapers, news websites and broadcasters from the nine-county Bay Area. The Post competed in the same division as the region’s large daily newspapers such as the San Francisco Chronicle and the Mercury News.
The contest was judged by journalists in other parts of the United States. The contest was for work published in 2019.
Those honored from the Post’s newsroom included Sara Tabin, Jamie Morrow, Allison Levitsky, John Angell Grant and Dave Price.
Price won a first-place award for political column and the contest’s first-, second- and third-place awards for editorials. His editorials covered a range of local topics from the Stanford admissions scandal to the $875,000 payout to the manager of the Silicon Valley Clean Water sewage processing district.
Price also took home a first-place award in commentary for his breakdown of odd political events in Los Altos. The commentary was headlined, “This story gets weirder and weirder.”
Jamie Morrow won first- and third-place honors for reviews she did of the HBO series “Silicon Valley,” which parodied life among local techies. John Angell Grant landed a second-place award for his May 11, 2019 review of “Pear Slices,” an evening of short plays performed at the Pear Theater in Mountain View.
Investigative reporting
The Post’s reputation for investigative reporting was burnished with two awards in that category.
Sara Tabin won a second-place award for her story that revealed sexual harassment complaints against a top cardiologist at Stanford and the Palo Alto VA Hospital, Dr. John Giacomini. Federal prosecutors have since charged Giacomini with sexual battery, and that criminal case is still moving through the system. Tabin also received a first-place prize in the category of news series or continuing coverage for her stories on Giacomini.
Allison Levitsky, who has since moved on to the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal, won the third-place prize for investigative reporting for a Jan. 22, 2019, story she wrote for the Post on the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District’s plans for a $50 million headquarters building, which had not been widely publicized before it was approved.
Tabin won a third-place award for news series for her stories on the controversies involving Los Altos City Manager Chris Jordan in his previous job in Oregon.
The Post won two awards for feature stories.
Levitsky won a third-place award for a feature of a light nature for her June 14, 2019, story about two twin brothers from Palo Alto’s Barron Park neighborhood, David and Robbie King, who were doing talk shows in their garage that were inspired by David Letterman’s “The Late Show.”
The third-place award for a feature of a serious nature went to Jamie Morrow for her July 15, 2019, story about how local engineers had restored a lunar guidance computer that was built as part of the Apollo program.
Perhaps the least serious award of the awards presentation was the headline awards. The goal is to write a headline that is both accurate and amusing.
For the second year in a row, the Post’s Dave Price swept the headline category. This time he won for “Why, oh why, would somebody steal the letter Y?”, “Yabba Dabba Doozy of a lawsuit” and “Yabba Dabba Don’t, town says.” Fred Flinstone would be proud.
The POST rules! Congratulations to Dave and his great team!
Kudos to the Post and the team!