Local Media Association revealed its 2025 Digital Innovation Awards on Wednesday, celebrating the local media organizations, journalists and teams pushing the industry forward through creativity, audience engagement and innovation.
Presented in partnership with Upland Second Street, this year’s awards honored impactful work across audience growth, storytelling, AI, product development, public service journalism and new business models.
LMA leaders said the honorees represent the resilience and forward-thinking ideas helping shape the future of local news at a time of rapid industry change.
The awards recognize organizations and individuals developing fresh approaches to connecting with audiences, growing sustainable businesses and strengthening local journalism in communities across North America.
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Advertising Sponsorship Innovation Award — Less than 250,000 monthly unique visitors
Third Place
YubaNet
Judge’s comments: YubaNet.com receives third place in the Advertising Sponsorship Innovation Award less than 250,000 monthly unique visitors for its branded content initiative with the Nevada Irrigation District. YubaNet shifted its revenue model away from traditional banner advertising toward high-value, immersive storytelling to solve complex messaging challenges for the district, pointing to a fresh approach in this category.
Second Place
Dallas Voice | OUT North Texas Visit Dallas Partnership
Judge’s comments: The Dallas Voice | OUT North Texas Visit Dallas Partnership is awarded second place in the Advertising Sponsorship Innovation Award less than 250,000 monthly unique visitors category. The project featured an innovative approach from a traditional, transactional media buy into a sophisticated, long-term economic development collaboration.
First Place
News4JAX / WJXT-TV
Judge’s comments: The News4JAX (WJXT-TV) earned first place in the Advertising Sponsorship Innovation Award less than 250,000 monthly unique visitors category for its multi-platform approach to branded content, including a creative mascot-driven content integration element that provided value outside traditional advertising mechanisms.
Advertising Sponsorship Innovation Award — More than 250,000 monthly unique visitors
Third Place
Newsday Media Group
Judge’s comments: Newsday is awarded third place in the Advertising Sponsorship Innovation Award more than 250,000 monthly unique visitors category for leveraging its massive scale to support the local economy during a period of high need, while simultaneously tapping into non-traditional revenue streams, highlighted in particular by its philanthropic impact.
Second Place
Questa del Rio News
Judge’s comments: Questa News is honored with second place in the Advertising Sponsorship Innovation Award more than 250,000 monthly unique visitors category for successfully transforming its revenue model by monetizing non-traditional editorial sections that were previously seen as low-margin or mandatory content. Their strategy focused on selling community goodwill and context rather than just white space on a page.
First Place
Lookout Santa Cruz
Judge’s comments: Lookout Santa Cruz is awarded first place in the Advertising Sponsorship Innovation Award in the more than 250,000 monthly unique visitors category for successfully resolving the persistent tension in sponsored content: delivering value to advertisers while maintaining absolute editorial trust. Their partnership with the Volunteer Center of Santa Cruz County serves as a blueprint for high-integrity branded content.
Audience Growth Strategy
Third Place
El Comercio de Colorado
Judge’s comments: El Comercio de Colorado earned third place in the Audience Growth Strategy category for its visual-first approach to social media engagement, which led to significant audience growth on Facebook and increased revenue because of it. The use of a coherent Visual Identity System served as the innovative catalyst that showed a deep understanding of how the audience consumes information in the digital space.
Second Place
The Santa Fe New Mexican
Judge’s comments: The Santa Fe New Mexican earned second place in the Audience Growth Strategy category for its comprehensive, multi-departmental digital transformation. The strategy connected a historic legacy brand to a modern, digital-first audience, as evident in its 21 percent digital subscription growth.
First Place
Times Union
Judge’s comments: The Times Union earned first place in the Audience Growth Strategy category for its innovative “Now” newsletter suite, a project that reimagined the relationship between a newsroom and its digital audience by a shift from routine to relevance. That meant a change to an event-driven distribution model, making the “arrival itself” a signal of relevance under a “frequency must be earned, not assumed” concept.
Best Contest and/or Promotion Award
First Place
Conecta Arizona
Judge’s comments: Conecta Arizona earned first place in the Best Contest and/or Promotion Award for its annual “Calaveritas Literarias,” or satirical symbolic “skull” poems. Under the concept that “tradition outpaces innovation,” the project revealed deep community roots, cultural innovation and measurable impact on border communities. Of particular note is the deep connection with the community, evident by the enduring popularity of its contest archives from 2020 to the present.
Community Engagement Award — 250,001 or more monthly unique visitors
First Place
Village Media
Judge’s comments: Village Media earned first place in the Community Engagement Award 250,001 or larger monthly unique visitors category for its Random Acts of Kindness program, an initiative that deepens community bonds by surprising deserving individuals, families and organizations with meaningful gifts and experiences based on reader nominations. Started as a local newsroom project, the program has scaled into a network-wide effort across 24 communities, powered by a collaborative partnership model between editorial teams, local sponsors and the public.
Community Engagement Award — Less than 250,000 monthly unique visitors
Third Place
Crosswinds News
Judge’s comments: Crosswinds News is awarded a third-place citation in the Community Engagement Award in the less than 250,000 monthly unique visitors category for its Listening and Learning Tour, a six-stop initiative across the Muscogee (Creek), Cherokee and Osage reservations. The project ranged beyond traditional audience analytics by facilitating direct, in-person conversations and surveys to better understand the information needs and civic engagement habits of Native communities.
Second Place
Mat-Su Sentinel
Judge’s comments: The Mat-Su Sentinel earned second place in the Community Engagement Award in the less than 250,000 monthly unique visitors category for its comprehensive 2025 election engagement initiative in Alaska’s Matanuska-Susitna Borough. The project achieved exceptional results, including participation by 26 of 30 candidates and a “Flip the Script” event that drew more than 150 residents.
First Place
Injustice Watch
Judge’s comments: Injustice Watch earned first place in the less than 250,000 monthly unique visitors category for its “Know Your Building. Know Your Landlord” work. The project used workshops, practical public-records guidance, video, print and social resources to help renters understand building code violations, property ownership and housing conditions.
Innovative Storytelling Award — Less than 250,000 unique monthly visitors
Third Place
Red Bank Green
Judge’s comments: Red Bank Green is awarded third place in the less than 250,000 unique monthly visitors Innovative Storytelling Award for its concept and execution of ground-level immersive video to capture the scale and energy of a No Kings protest in Red Bank, New Jersey. Publisher Kenny Katzgrau rode an electric skateboard to keep the camera physically embedded within the march, creating a continuous point-of-view video that captured the scale, density and energy of the moment in real time.
Second Place
Enlace Latino NC
Judge’s comments: The Enlace Latino NC project is recognized as the second-place recipient in the less than 250,000 unique monthly visitors Innovative Storytelling Award for its masterful use of WhatsApp as a primary distribution channel for essential service journalism. Enlace Latino NC transformed verified reporting into concise, one-to-two-minute audio scripts and used a customized version of ChatGPT to streamline the adaptation of long-form guides into conversational, neutral Spanish audio.
First Place
Crosswinds News
Judge’s comments: The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Two Spirit and Transgender People Historical Reporting Project by Crosswinds News is recognized as the first-place winner in the less than 250,000 unique monthly visitors Innovative Storytelling Award for its profound and pioneering approach to investigative journalism through the process of historical preservation. By moving beyond the typical focus on present-day cases of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Two-Spirit, and Transgender people, this initiative utilized intensive archival research to restore visibility to cases over a century old. Through a collaborative cohort of Indigenous journalists, the project produced 15 deeply reported stories that revealed a modern crisis to be a systemic, generational issue. Crosswinds News demonstrated its commitment to innovative storytelling techniques by creating a replicable reporting toolkit, ensuring that storytelling linking the past to the present can be adopted by newsrooms nationwide to serve communities. Training journalists to use primary source materials from the historical record is an important, often overlooked element in deep reporting. Crosswinds News understood that and, as much, showed that archival innovation is just as important as learning to use trendy platforms.
Innovative Storytelling Award — 250,001 or more unique monthly visitors
Second Place
Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Judge’s comments: The Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is awarded second place in the 250,001 and more unique monthly visitors Innovative Storytelling Award category for its commitment to high-quality, long-form visual journalism through the “Unpacking the Issue” series. The project used deeply researched video segments, sometimes 20 to 40 minutes long, with chaptering that allowed viewers to watch the full work or focus on specific areas of interest.
First Place
The Indianapolis Star
Judge’s comments: The Indianapolis Star is recognized for first place in the 250,000 and more unique monthly visitors Innovative Storytelling Award for its comprehensive, multi-platform approach to making the complex and divisive civic issue of redistricting accessible, understandable, nonpartisan, and engaging for a broad audience. By moving beyond traditional reporting, the Star deployed an energetic Live Blog that attracted more than 85,000 pageviews and a conversational politics newsletter, ‘Checks and Balances’. In addition, the Star’s innovative use of social media was particularly effective, with TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook videos reaching hundreds of thousands of viewers. One Facebook video alone attracted over 660,000 views. This initiative demonstrated that complex political topics can drive massive engagement when paired with immersive digital storytelling across platforms.
Most Innovative Use of AI in a News Organization Award
Second Place
Lookout Local / Lookout Santa Cruz
Judge’s comments: Lookout Local (Santa Cruz) earned second place in the Most Innovative Use of AI in a News Organization Award for its Neighborhood Newsletters, a daily hyperlocal news product that uses AI to sift through public data and sort it geographically. The system made it possible for a small editorial team to provide relevant block-by-block information that would otherwise be impossible to produce manually.
First Place
Connecticut Public
Judge’s comments: Connecticut Public is awarded first place in the Most Innovative Use of AI in a News Organization Award for its Public Meeting Monitor, a newsroom tool that deploys AI to automatically monitor, transcribe and summarize livestreamed municipal meetings. The tool creates actionable news leads that might otherwise go unreported because of declining newsroom resources while keeping journalistic decision-making human-led.
New Revenue Stream Award — Less than 250,000 monthly unique visitors
First Place
PublicSource
Judge’s comments: PublicSource earned first-place honors in the less than 250,000 monthly unique visitors New Revenue Stream Award category for its counterintuitive neighborhood zine project. The project put its digital-first journalism into tangible, revenue-generating community publications tailored to Pittsburgh neighborhoods, generating sponsorship revenue, adding donors and distributing nearly 3,000 physical zines.
New Revenue Stream Award — 250,001 or more unique monthly visitors
First Place
Times Union
Judge’s comments: In the 250,001 or more unique monthly visitors New Revenue Stream Award category, the Times Union is the winner for repositioning its Capitol Confidential newsletter from a free morning roundup into a value-driven, tiered subscription model serving the New York statehouse community. Capitol Confidential Pro integrated Times Union journalism with a policy intelligence platform, offering legislative tracking, real-time alerts and searchable transcripts. The initiative created a six-figure recurring revenue stream within its first two years.
Product Innovation Award — 250,001 or less monthly unique visitors
First Place
Lookout Local
Judge’s comments: Lookout Local is the winner of the 250,001 and more monthly unique visitors Product Innovation Award for developing and launching mobile apps designed to support community journalism through deep audience engagement. Lookout launched fully native mobile apps for Lookout Santa Cruz and Lookout Eugene-Springfield, enhancing audience experience and newsroom efficiency through a consistent web and mobile user experience and a “publish once” editorial workflow.
First Place
Granite State News Collaborative
Judge’s comments: Plucky Wire in partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative earned the less than 250,000 monthly unique visitors Product Innovation Award for transforming an aging manual story-sharing process into a frictionless, scalable digital “wire” service for local newsrooms. It replaced inconsistent email chains and spreadsheets with a platform that uploaded, tracked, and republished trusted content. Over a period of 12 months, the platform shared 7,272 stories and 3,585 downloads for republication. Plucky invests 20% of profits to the Granite State News Collaborative to support and grow local journalism.
Public Service Community Impact Award — 250,001 or more monthly unique visitors
First Place
The Santa Fe New Mexican
Judge’s comments: The Santa Fe New Mexican receives the 250,001 or more monthly unique visitors Public Service Community Impact Award for its investigative series “Dead in the Desert,” which exposed the neglect of human remains believed to be those of migrants along the New Mexico-Mexico border. The series revealed repeated failures by officials to respond to reports of remains and used data-driven reporting, drone video and open access to maximize public impact.
Public Service Community Impact Award — Less than 250,000 monthly unique visitors
Third Place
Dallas Voice
Judge’s comments: Dallas Voice earned third place in the less than 250,000 unique monthly visitors Publlic Service Community Impact category for its targeted outreach to serve LGBTQ individuals living in a documented news desert. The initiative demonstrated the life-saving potential of local journalism when a resident, struggling with suicidal thoughts, credited a copy of the Dallas Voice with connecting him to essential mental health resources and a sense of community. By treating journalism as vital civic infrastructure, the project successfully bridged the gap between isolated individuals and critical support networks, underscoring, as the entry pointed out, that the “value of local journalism cannot always be measured in impressions or revenue.”
Second Place
AFRO American Newspapers
Judge’s comments: AFRO American Newspapers earned second place in the less than 250,000 unique monthly visitors Public Service Community Impact category for its data-driven reporting on racial and geographic disparities in credit scores, specifically focusing on Baltimore. Staff Writer Victoria Mejicanos used Opportunity Insights data to show that Baltimore residents live in the county with the lowest average credit score among the 100 most populous counties in the U.S. The reporting helped lead to a public Community Conversation on Credit Equity organized by the Maryland Bankers Association.
First Place
Arizona Luminaria
Judge’s comments: The Arizona Luminaria earned first place in the less than 250,000 unique monthly visitors Public Service Community Impact Award category for its investigative reporting that penetrated years of government secrecy surrounding a proposed 290-acre data center in Tucson and Pima County. Reporter Yana Kunichoff utilized strategic public records requests to uncover a document that identified Amazon Web Services as the entity behind the project, making Arizona Luminaria the first news organization in the state to expose the identity that officials had hidden under non-disclosure agreements.The newsroom’s bilingual reporting in English and Spanish sparked unprecedented civic engagement, leading thousands of residents to attend public meetings and organize opposition through the No Desert Data Center Coalition.Permanent policy reforms ensued, as Pima County and the Tucson City Council adopted mandatory “sunshine periods” for public disclosure and limits on the duration of secrecy agreements. By embedding primary source documents directly into its stories, Arizona Luminaria provided residents with the tools to hold elected officials accountable and established a new standard for transparency in local economic development, serving as a key example of accountability reporting.
Rising Star in Innovation Award
First Place
Ruby Jones, Empower Media Exchange
Judge’s comments: Ruby Jones is the recipient of the Rising Star in Innovation Award. Jones shows exceptional potential because she has moved beyond a high-level contributor to becoming a structural architect, with systemic innovation evident in her founding of the nonprofit Empower Media Exchange. Her work created civic infrastructure for a more ethical, transparent and community-centered alternative to traditional media and included Colorado’s first Community Information Commons.
Innovator of the Year
First Place
Melanie Plenda, Granite State News Collaborative / Plucky Works
Judge’s comments: Melanie Plenda is the first-place recipient in the Innovator of the Year category for her transformative leadership as executive director of the Granite State News Collaborative and for the development of Plucky Works, a company that creates editorial software for small newsrooms. Her key innovations include scaling collaborative journalism to more than 30 media and civic partners and developing Plucky Wire, a platform for newsrooms to share work. In a single year, those partners shared 7,272 stories, with 3,600 republished across the network, saving New Hampshire newsrooms an estimated 20,000+ hours of staff time.