Boise State Public Radio News took home one first-place award and one second-place award in the national Public Media Journalists Association's (PMJA) annual contest.
Entries from Boise State Public Radio were judged alongside other public radio stations of similar size: mid-sized newsrooms with four to seven full-time reporters.
Reporter Rachel Cohen won first place in the Special Feature Category: COVID-2021 for her story on a nurse at St. Luke's in Boise sharing her experience through poetry. Sara McDonald began writing poetry after a particularly taxing night working with patients in the telemetry unit.
Samantha Wright took home second place for her reporting on an international investigation by the Idaho Agriculture Department that may have saved the state $1 billion. The story talks about invasive zebra mussels that traveled from Ukraine to Idaho and threaten to poison the state's water supply but were tracked down before they could target Idaho's waterways.
The Mountain West News Bureau also took home a PMJA award for its reporting on tribal jails investigations.
You can see a full list of PMJA winners below: