Top business prize for Gazette’s senior reporter among outlet’s 5 awards in SC contest

COLUMBIA — SC Daily Gazette senior reporter Jessica Holdman took top honors for business journalism at the South Carolina Press Association’s annual awards ceremony Friday.

Her awards were among five total won by the Gazette in its inaugural year. The nonprofit news outlet competed in Division A, the category for the state’s largest daily newspapers. That means the Gazette was competing against colleagues with The Post and Courier, The State, and the Greenville News.

Holdman won the Ken Baldwin Award for Excellence in Business Journalism for all daily news outlets in South Carolina as well as first place in business beat reporting for Division A.

Reporter Skylar Laird received two Division A awards: second place in breaking news reporting and third place in education beat reporting.

And contributing columnist Paul Hyde won second place for column writing.

The annual contest awarded the state’s best in journalism — including articles, photos, columns, editorials, and page layouts — published between mid-November 2023 and mid-November 2024. For the Gazette, however, entries covered the six months since it became a press association member.

Winners of most categories were declared weeks ahead of the event. But the Ken Baldwin Award was among contests unannounced until the presentation Friday at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center.

The award, sponsored by the University of South Carolina’s journalism school, is named in memory of Kenneth W. Baldwin Jr., a USC graduate and benefactor of financial journalism education. The former business editor died in 2022 at age 96.

Contest judges said Holdman “examined business and economic development matters broadly, including their history and possible future impact.

“Her reporting covers everything from the emerging issues related to lithium battery manufacturing to the future of South Carolina’s once-dominating textile industry,” they wrote in explaining their choice. “Her work is very well done and well-researched. But most of all her stories are interesting, appealing not only to business ‘readers’ but everyone.”

The Baldwin award came with a $500 prize.

Holdman’s winning entries for her first-place business beat award included reports on emergency responders’ preparations for lithium fires, the transformation of the state’s textile industry, and a real estate developer’s lucrative leasing arrangement with the state.

Laird’s award for breaking news involved her reporting on the Medical University of South Carolina’s decision to end all gender-transition treatments — which provided answers to readers that MUSC hadn’t provided its own patients at the time and ahead of other outlets — and the scrambling of LGBTQ advocates to connect patients with care elsewhere.

Her award for education reporting involved students enrolled for state-paid K-12 scholarships in the program’s first year, parents left in limbo after the state Supreme Court declared the private tuition payments illegal, and a surprisingly high number of 3- and 4-year-olds suspended from South Carolina preschools.

In opinion writing, Hyde’s winning columns advocated closing the “Charleston loophole” as a memorial to the nine victims gunned down in a Charleston church in 2015, examined the legacy of the 1934 Bloody Thursday massacre of striking mill workers in Honea Path, and emphasized the importance of voting in state and local elections.

What is the SC Daily Gazette? A free, online news outlet on a mission.

The SC Daily Gazette launched on Nov. 14, 2023, as the 37th affiliate of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.

It is an ad-free, online news outlet supported by grants and donations.

The four-person newsroom consists of three founding staffers — Editor Seanna Adcox, Holdman, and Laird — and reporter Shaun Chornobroff, who joined in January.

Our mission is to cover state government and officials and how their decisions affect people across the Palmetto State — and to provide that coverage for free to both readers and other news outlets to republish.

While the Gazette doesn’t print a newspaper, it offers a free subscription to emailed newsletters that arrive in inboxes six mornings a week.