CTNewsJunkie.com

CTNewsJunkie was the first digital-only news organization to arrive at the state Capitol in Hartford. We forced legacy news organizations to start producing news stories at the increased pace of digital to keep up with us, and our reporting has provided people with a window on the inner workings of all three branches of government. Public service journalism has always been our goal, and last year - as measles outbreaks were popping up around the country for the first time in 25 years - we pushed the Connecticut Department of Public Health into releasing school-level vaccination data for the first time by highlighting the law preventing the data's release. The release of the data showed a shocking number of schools below the CDC's recommended immunization rate of 95%, and an increasing trend of parents using a religious exemption to avoid vaccinating their children despite the lack of any underlying health issue preventing them from being vaccinated. The legislature took notice and then took action, and began working toward a number of initiatives to improve vaccination rates. The series of news stories, which won both a LION Publishers award as well as the Public Service Journalism award from the Connecticut Society of Professional Journalists. More importantly, the coverage opened the conversation about personal responsibility within the context of public health and, almost as though it was foreshadowing the COVID-19 pandemic, the coverage positioned us as a go-to source of information for the arrival of a disease far more deadly than measles.