I was pleased to attend the Online Journalism Awards on Saturday night. Some winning highlights included:

The 19th won a Breaking News award for its coverage of the Dobbs decision, including some really great data journalism. I’m proud of, and very happy for, my friends there. By the way, you should subscribe to data visuals reporter Jasmine Mithani’s great newsletter, data + feelings.

ProPublica won a few awards for its journalism, including on the proliferation of junk science in the justice system and on how viruses transmit from animals to people.

The Marshall Project won two awards for its work covering the American criminal justice system. Stories included a two-year investigation into abuses by correctional officers in New York State and a three-year story about mitigation specialists who help death penalty defendants by documenting their childhood traumas.

The Markup won an Excellence in Technology Reporting award for its reporting on broadband pricing across the US. I loved this reporting and directly used it to help a family member get a better broadband deal.

Every one of these finalists and winners is worth checking out. This is why I’m finding working in product and technology for non-profit news to be so rewarding: you get to support journalists who are genuinely making the world a better, more democratic place by shedding light on stories we need to know about.

News media in the US gets a lot of flak, and some of it is deserved. But the non-profit news industry in particular is doing incredible work, sometimes reporting stories for years on end, and putting every story out there for the public to read without a paywall in sight. These non-profit organizations deserve our personal and institutional support. They make our democracy better.