Journalist and author Tatiana Schlossberg believed that providing people with information could help them make the world a better place. In that spirit, the Los Angeles Press Club launched the Tatiana Schlossberg Environmental Cash Award at the 68th annual Southern California Journalism Awards.
The $1,000 prize will be given to a journalist or team that delivered rigorous reporting about a response to an environmental problem and the evidence behind the solution. The honor is sponsored by author, scholar and professor Angela Aleiss.
“Tatiana showed tremendous strength and courage during the last year of her devastating illness,” Aleiss said. “But let us also remember that as an author and journalist Tatiana was able to convince everyday citizens that we can make informed decisions about our relationship and responsibility to the environment.”
As a journalist, Schlossberg worked at The Record in Northern New Jersey and at The New York Times. She also published the book "Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have."
“It’s up to us to create a country that takes seriously its obligations to the planet, to each other, and to the people who will be born into a world that looks different than ours has for the last 10,000 years or so,” Schlossberg wrote in "Inconspicuous Consumption." “Essentially, what I’m describing is hard work with possibly limited success for the rest of your life. But we have to do it, and at least we will have the satisfaction of knowing we made things better.”
Tatiana Schlossberg Environmental Cash Award 2026 Winners
First Place: Lisa Fung, Blueprint Magazine, “Gaurav Sant: Looking to the Oceans for Answers”
Judges’ comment: This has everything this category requires. Rigorous reporting on a response to an environmental problem and its associated evidence, as well as how they're trying to fix it. It was solid writing with a unique twist on storytelling.
Second Place: Michelle Peng, The San Francisco Standard, “California Forests Have a Labor Crisis: Not Enough People Willing to Climb Trees”
Third Place: Gabrielle Canon, Hilary Beaumont, Lois Beckett, Maanvi Singh and Sam Levin, The Guardian, “The Perfect Storm: Why Did LA’s Wildfires Explode Out of Control?”