WLRN won first place for Feature Reporting in the 2025 Green Eyeshade Awards and won top recognition in the Investigative Reporting category.
The Green Eyeshade Awards, given by the Society of Professional Journalists, have been recognizing Southeastern news for 67 years, making this the nation's oldest regional journalism contest. The region is composed of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia. For the first time, journalists from Virginia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands were also eligible to compete.
WLRN won first place in the Feature Reporting category for a story produced by Veronica Zaragovia and Carlton Gillespie. The story — “As extreme temperatures persist in South Florida, so do threats of heat-related illness” — was broadcast and published online last August. The seven-minute feature explored the impact the record-breaking heat wave in South Florida was having on people who are required to work outdoors as part of their job. The issue was also a major topic of debate in the Florida Legislature for local governments in South Florida.
WLRN Investigative Reporter Danny Rivero won a second-place award for a story he produced for his in-depth report on the consequences of Gov. Ron DeSantis' sweeping 2023 anti-union bill, which required most public sector unions to boost the rate of members paying dues or be disbanded. A year after it came into effect, he painstakingly put together data from across the state — and what he found was astonishing.
Rivero reviewed hundreds of pages of state union recertification filings and reported that tens of thousands of workers had lost their collective bargaining rights, a right that is explicitly protected by the Florida Constitution.
Unions representing tens of thousands of additional public sector workers across the state were also in danger of being decertified and dissolved.
The numbers were not being tracked or published by the state or any labor organization, so WLRN requested the records and created a public database to track the fallout of the law.
