The WLRN Radio news team walked away with several honors during Saturday night’s 2025 Sunshine State Award ceremony at NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale.
WLRN Digital Producer Alyssa Ramos won first place in the “Newsletter – Affiliated” category for the A/C, a weekly newsletter launched last year that focuses on Arts and Culture news in South Florida. It is published online each Wednesday afternoon.
WLRN Americas Editor Tim Padgett, who also hosts the weekly South Florida Roundup publica affairs show, was named a finalist in as “Journalist of the Year.” First place went to Miami Herald reporter Jacqueline Charles for her coverage of Haiti’s ongoing humanitarian crisis.
Producer Sherrilyn Cabrera was a finalist as “Anchor of the Year” for a collection of her work. First place went to WUSF’s Matthew Peddie, who is host of Florida Matters and Our Changing State.
This year's top winners shared $15,000 in prize money from A-Mark Foundation and Society for Professional Journalism. Other sponsors included the Knight Foundation, Fort Lauderdale-based Schlesinger law offices, Top of Mind PR, Pierson Grant, Durée & Company, Miami-based Magic 13 Brewing and Cooper’s Hawk Winery & Restaurants.
READ MORE: WLRN Investigations team honored with Esserman-Knight Journalism Award, reporting fellowship grant
The top prize — the A-Mark Foundation Award for Investigative Journalism — went to Trevor Aaronson and Eleanor Knight, of Western Sound and Audible, for “Pulse: The Untold Story.”
The journalists revisited the narrative driven by the FBI and media about the 2016 Pulse nightclub attack, one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history. Forty-nine people were killed and 53 others were injured in the attack.
The FBI and the media embraced a story that the attacker was a secretly gay Islamist extremist who targeted the LGBTQ+ community. It was wrong, the journalists found.
“This false narrative obscured the truth and concealed the FBI’s failures to prevent the attack,” say the journalists.
Western Sound, a Los Angeles-based podcast production company, teamed up with Audible, the Amazon-owned audio and podcast company, to produce the series of podcasts.
Earlier this year, Aaronson and his production team won the prestigious national Peabody Award for the series.
“[The shooter] was motivated by opposition to American military intervention in Iraq and Syria, and his attack on the nightclub was purely opportunistic,” wrote the Peabody Award judges. “This warping of the truth is significant, because the public memory of [the shooter’s] motive, ultimately crafted by the FBI, shrouded the agency’s systematic failures.”
In accepting the Peabody Award, Aaronson said he and his team “set out to correct the record to reveal how the government misled the public, to cover up for the FBI’s failure to prevent the deadliest attack in the LGBTQ-plus community in U.S. history.”
“We hope that by finally revealing the truth about what happened we can offer some measure of closure and comfort to those affected by this mass shooting,” Aaronson said.
Read the full list of 2025 Sunshine State Award winners and finalists here.
