Congratulations to all the winners at Wednesday’s 2015 SPJ San Diego Area Journalism Awards Contest.

The full list of winners can be found here.

Local journalists from a wide variety of news outlets came to celebrate at SPJ San Diego Pro Chapter’s awards banquet at the Bali Hai. They applauded each other’s work and listened to an inspirational speech from The San Diego Union Tribune’s Jeff McDonald, the 2015 San Diego Journalist of the Year.

McDonald was chosen for covering a story so complex and bureaucratic that many journalists wouldn’t even know where to start: how state regulators handled the shutdown of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. McDonald thought a $4.7 billion settlement to pay for the shutdown seemed “somewhat lopsided” since customers would foot 70 percent of the cost, so he began asking questions. He discovered the deal was hatched in secret at a luxury hotel in Poland. His reporting prompted state politicians and California’s Office of Ratepayer Advocates, one of the parties to the agreement, to criticize and take a closer look at it.

The crowd also toasted The San Diego Daily Transcript, which will close its doors this September after 130 years.

New this year for San Diego SPJ’s contest were two awards that memorialized San Diego journalism legends Gloria Penner and Neil Morgan. San Diego SPJ also gave out the first ever Wildcard award for coverage of the 2014 wildfires and the Mark of Excellence award.

You can read coverage of the event from Times of San Diego here. Congratulations to everyone and thank you for celebrating with us.