The Coronado News won the James Julian Memorial Award for the San Diego Pro chapter of the 2024 Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) contest—an award given to the best community service story or series for the year.
The award recognized The Coronado News’ outstanding coverage with their investigative series on the century-long binational sewage crisis.
Dennis Wagner, Craig Harris, Madeline Yang and Julieta Soto’s detailed reporting exposed the health and safety impacts on community members in Coronado as well as residents of Tijuana. It all came together in a series of articles, pictures and a documentary.
This same series also won first place at the SPJ contest for the category “Daily Reporting and Writing: Investigative/Enterprise Series.”
And, Soto and Yang’s story, “We struggle…we grab water from a pipe” won third place in the “Daily Reporting and Writing — Environment Story.”
About the series
The Coronado News, a startup that launched in February 2023, is part of North Island LLC and owned by businessman Paul Huntsman, whose family has a home in Coronado.
In 2023, Wagner, Harris, Yang and Soto began investigating the legacy of broken promises by U.S. and Mexican officials that have resulted in millions of gallons of raw sewage flowing into the Pacific Ocean.
Scott Goldman and Ben Cunningham designed the series in TheCoronadoNews.com and the weekly print edition.
In the aftermath of the project, there have been significant efforts to stop the flow of millions of gallons of untreated human waste into the ocean.
Most notably, President Joe Biden in October asked Congress for an additional $310 million to fix the beleaguered South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant, which is supposed to treat Tijuana sewage before it’s released into the sea.
U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla traveled on June 5 to the South Bay plant to address the trans-border water pollution issue.
On June 27, San Diego County Supervisors declared a state of emergency and forty San Diego County nonprofit organizations sent letters on July 14 to Gov. Gavin Newsom and Biden urging swift action on the pollution problem.
Further, hundreds of Imperial Beach grade school students wrote letters to Biden asking for help in June, and a bipartisan group of local women formed StoptheSewage.org, which included beach rallies with Coronado and Imperial Beach’s mayors.
