Call For Nominations

The 2025 Houston Community Media Awards offer you an opportunity to showcase the coverage you or your outlet published or aired during 2024 that you are proud of. The winning entries will represent examples of “the best” of our sector’s journalism.

The awards showcase the passion that drives our media – to tell the stories and amplify the experiences and perspectives of the audiences we serve. They also underscore the unique value of our journalism – a parallel universe of news that expands our understanding of our own and each others’ communities.

Awards will be presented for outstanding achievement in the following categories:

1. 1. 1.  Newsbreaking: reports of newsbreaking events or issues that occurred within your community, or happened at state, national or even global levels but directly impacted your community. These include coverage of events in politics, health care, the economy, education, the environment, social justice issues, sports-food-entertainment, private life. They can be narrow in focus – the death of a respected community member, for example, the opening of a new shopping mall, the election of a first-time candidate, a crime that traumatized community members – or they can be global or national, such as a breaking news story about the 2024 presidential elections, or developments in home countries that impacted diaspora populations. Or they can track issues and events at the state or local level. We are looking for stories that are original – that fill holes in the news – and that are well reported with quotes and facts that support the story. Reports that offer a unique window into the issues and events that matter to your audiences.
      2. Advocacy: our media have always seen a key role as advocating for our communities. The mission statement of Freedom Journal, the first Black newspaper published in NY in 1827, stated: “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us.” This category encourages you to select examples from editorials you published in 2024 or columns by commentators and contributors that argued for a particular issue, on behalf of a particular cause. Again, the topics can be global, national, state, regional, or hyper-local. The entries will highlight concerns that matter deeply to your community. Judging will be based on the originality of the topic, the compelling nature of the argument, and the quality of the language.
      3. News You Can Use: our media sector is prized for delivering information that helps people navigate both their communities and the wider public realm – how to get your child into school, health care issues you need to know to protect your family, where and how to register to vote, how to apply for relief from a natural disaster, personal advice about dealing with intimate relationship, how to protect yourself from hate crimes. Even information about how to adopt or care for a pet, or cook healthier meals, or pay off debts, might qualify. These entries have to be original – not press releases sent out by PR agencies. You or your outlet put the information together to fill a knowledge gap in your community.
      4. Social Media for, by or about Gen Z: This category seeks examples of social media posts and podcasts including videos and audio segments, music and spoken word, that resonate with Gen Z or are produced by Gen Z. There is such a wide gap separating the younger generation from the rest of us. We are looking for content that bridges that gap, that illuminates what matters to teens and young adults. The content producers don’t have to be members of Gen Z. The content has to address Gen Z. Originality, fact-based perspectives, quality of expression are all factors judges will consider.
      5. Features: stories that document the intimate lives of our communities. They might include portraits of individuals with unique experiences to share or who have made significant contributions to their families or communities, personal essays that recount historical events, reviews of movies, books, art exhibits, concerts, profiles of community service organizations, landscapes such as public parks or buildings. Quality of writing or presentation matters, as do the insights the feature provides about the community.
      6. Photography: A picture, we know, is often worth a 1000 words. This category is open to photographs that capture moments in time, such as a child’s first smile; real life experiences; portraits of individuals, animals, plants; majestic landscapes. This category recognizes the importance of photography to our sector.