Heath Haussamen / NMPolitics.net
A scene from downtown Truth or Consequences. NMPolitics.net editor and publisher Heath Haussamen wrote an article for the State of Change project on how a new brewery was helping breathe life into downtown T or C.
An article by NMPolitics.net editor and publisher Heath Haussamen is part of a series that has won two first-place awards in a multi-state journalism competition.
The State of Change series, which examined the challenge of building resilient rural communities in New Mexico, won first place in the public service journalism and business enterprise journalism categories for mid-sized news organizations. The awards were given in the Society of Professional Journalists’ Top of the Rockies competition for work published in 2017 by journalists in New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.
The awards were announced in Denver on Friday.
Several New Mexico news organizations, with support from High Country News and the Solutions Journalism Network, collaborated for months on the project. Haussamen’s article focused on how a new brewery was helping breathe life into downtown Truth or Consequences and how the offbeat, impoverished town might attract more entrepreneurs.
“Each piece in this series could have won a first-place designation on its own,” a judge in the Top of the Rockies competition wrote. “Each was told so beautifully, weaving interesting and important data throughout, showing the human side to issues many small towns across the U.S. are facing in the aftermath of industry, job and population loss.”
Another judge called the “mammoth” project the New Mexico newsrooms undertook “an impressive collection of 16 stories.”
In addition to focusing in T or C, the series looked in-depth at challenges and possible solutions in communities including Carlsbad, Deming, Farmington, the Navajo Nation, Questa and Raton.
You can find the entire 2017 series, plus a second round of related articles published earlier this month, by clicking here.