In 2025, The Tribune will honor Mormon Women for Ethical Government, the League of Women Voters of Utah and Parr Brown Gee & Loveless for their tireless work to ensure all Utahns are represented.
Leaders from the three organizations will jointly receive the NewsMaker Award at our third annual NewsMakers Awards and Dinner on November 20.
NewsMakers is an annual celebration of those who make the news and those who shape it. The event serves as a major fundraiser for the nonprofit Tribune.
The honorees’ work has origins in Proposition 4, which Utah voters approved in 2018, creating a nonpartisan commission to draw congressional and legislative districts. After essentially repealing the initiative, the Legislature ignored the commission’s recommendations and adopted its own congressional maps in 2021. The maps divided Salt Lake County into four congressional districts — diluting voters’ influence, and notably splitting neighbors on one Millcreek street into four different districts.
Mormon Women for Ethical Government and the League of Women Voters came together as plaintiffs, alleging the maps constituted “gerrymandering” and that the Legislature overrode the will of voters. David Reymann of Parr Brown has principally argued their case.
In 2024, the Utah Supreme Court ruled citizen-led initiatives are constitutionally protected from being overridden by the Legislature, a win for the people.
Katharine Biele (LWV), Emma Petty Addams (MWEG) and Dave Reymann will join me on stage at NewsMakers for a conversation about how they came together to say no more gerrymandering in our state.
Their work is a story of Utah at its best: listening to our neighbors, working together and advocating for change.
At NewsMakers, we will also recognize Kati Jo Christensen, a teacher from Weber County, with the Utah Solutions Award.
Christensen, a special education teacher, shares videos of herself dancing in the classroom and uses the money she earns from the videos and donations to pay off student lunch debt in Utah. She posts on TikTok under the username MrsCactusVibes.
Finally, we will honor senior managing editor Sheila McCann with the Tribune Service award for her thoughtful work with dozens of reporters in our nonprofit newsroom. Sheila was the lead editor on The Tribune’s Pulitzer Prize-winning team, which published a series of investigations exposing how sexual assault victims in Utah were punished, shamed and mistreated. She is a major driver of our newsroom’s accountability reporting, with a background in covering both business and courts.
We hope you’ll join us at NewsMakers, which this year is at the recently remodeled Utah State Fairgrounds. Dinner will be served by Hill Top Hospitality, the team behind Hearth and Hill, Hill’s Kitchen and Urban Hill. It is a fundraising event, and by joining us you will support our efforts to bring more journalism to more people.
The Tribune’s mission is to be an essential community resource, reporting on issues that impact all Utahns. We are dedicated to holding the powerful to account, to surfacing solutions to the challenges facing Utahns, and to enriching our communities.
Help us do this work by joining us at NewsMakers.