Patch Wins 4 L.A. Press Club Awards

Patch captured four journalism prizes Sunday night at the 54th Annual L.A. Press Club awards ceremony, held at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in L.A.

Rancho Santa Margarita editor Martin Henderson took home two online sportswriting awards – first place for a story about over Servite, and third place for a winning his third State Bowl Championship in six years with three different teams.

First place for Online News went to a team of San Gabriel Valley Patch editors for coverage of a Nov. 30 windstorm that caused unprecedented destruction and power outages in the foothills and northeast Los Angeles. Most of their sites had been launched barely more than a year earlier.

Patch's of Seal Beach salon mass earned editors Nancy Wride of Belmont Shore-Naples Patch and Paige Austin of Los Alamitos-Seal Beach Patch third place in the Online News category.

The big winners of the evening were the L.A. Times and KPCC-FM, which each won eight first-place awards, followed by the L.A. Business Journal, L.A. Weekly and KCET's SoCal Connected, each with six first-place prizes.

The event also honored the family of slain reporter Daniel Pearl, and the investigative team of Bob Woodward (who appeared via video feed on a giant screen, on the eve of a book deadline) and Carl Bernstein (who spoke to the crowd in person). Bernstein accepted for the legendary Watergate reporting team the club's President's Award from actors Martin Sheen and Pauley Perrette. This is the 40th anniversary of the historic reporting that brought down President Richard Nixon and many co-conspirators.