The Connecticut Mirror won seven awards in the Connecticut Society of Professional Journalists’ 2025 Excellence in Journalism Contest, including the First Amendment Award, one of the annual contest’s three major prizes.
The First Amendment Award honors reporting that “increases the public understanding of the role of the press in a free society.” CT Mirror won for “On the Hook,” an exposé of the lax standards and predatory practices that allowed the towing industry to victimize people who live paycheck to paycheck.
The investigation, produced in collaboration with ProPublica, was recently honored with the Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting and named a finalist for the FOI award from the Investigative Reporters & Editors organization.
CT Mirror took home a total of seven SPJ awards, including three first place prizes and three second place prizes.
The winners are:
First Place:
- John Moritz for “How a CT student’s research project became a casualty of Trump’s DEI purge,” in the Education category
- Katy Golvala and Laura Tillman for “Lamont nixed overdose prevention centers, but advocates fight on” in the Health category
- Shahrzad Rasekh for “This Ukrainian family fled war in Odesa and found a foothold in CT,” in the Feature Photo category
Second Place:
- Dave Altimari for “Made in the shade: CT tobacco farmers roll with the times” in the Business category
- Emilia Otte for “Drug overdoses in CT prisons raising alarms” in Courts and crime category
- Emilia Otte and Angela Eichhorst for “ICE arrests, deportations in CT up sharply in Trump’s second term” in Data Reporting category
Hearst Connecticut Media Group won the contest’s other two major awards — the Stephen A. Collins Public Service Award and Theodore Driscoll Award for Investigative Reporting — for “No Place to Sleep,” a project in which a group of journalists and photographers covered 48 hours of homelessness across the state.
