Today, the Knight-funded Livingston Awards presented its annual honors to journalists under 35. Below, Tampa Bay Times reporter Alexandra Zayas, 29, who received a 2012 Livingston Award for a yearlong investigative report that uncovered abuse of children in unlicensed religious group homes, talks about the experience. Documentary photos by Kathleen Flynn. Portrait by Tampa Bay Times.

I was sitting at my desk, in a bureau of the Tampa Bay Times, when I got the call. I couldn’t wait until it was over to tell my editor. As the director of the awards told me about the upcoming luncheon in New York City, I flailed my arms, pointed at the phone, and mouthed Livingston. “You won?” my editor shouted. I pumped my fist. Before the call was over, my editor had produced bottles of champagne and announced the win to the entire newsroom. The plastic flutes were making the rounds when the awards director left me with some parting words: Don’t tell anyone yet.

Oops.

Alexandra Zayas

I couldn’t help myself. For years, I had watched the list of finalists, and for years, I had dreamed of being among them. That would mean my local stories had been noticed on a national level. I never imagined I’d win, that I’d find myself, a few weeks later, sitting at a table with the publisher of my newspaper and Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page and 60 Minutes’ Morley Safer. I remember taking the stage to tell the crowd about the story I’d spent the past year reporting.

“In God’s Name” exposed decades of abuse at unlicensed religious children’s homes in the most remote corners of Florida. I spent months listening to dozens of former residents describe the extreme, bizarre, humiliating discipline they endured. Many had no means of reporting abuse while they were locked away; once they did, months or years later, they got no help. The hardest thing about hearing these young people open old wounds was the fear that it would all be in vain, that my series would fall short of giving their stories the attention they deserved. I’ll never forget how surreal it felt to stand at the podium that day and look out at a roomful of the most powerful media leaders in America and watch them widen their eyes and shake their heads and listen, deeply listen, to the accounts of kids once dismissed as troubled liars. That’s what the Livingston Awards does, especially with its local category. It amplifies stories that need to be amplified. Related Press Release

June 12, 2014: “Livingston Awards announced for young journalists” 

The Livingston also amplified me. It put me on the radar of editors at the best publications in the country as well as fellow young journalists whose work I now follow and study. I also got a chance to teach. The Awards sponsored a free webinar in conjunction with the Poynter Institute so that I could share the lessons I’d learned while reporting my award-winning series. Though I have chosen to remain at the Tampa Bay Times, where I now do investigative projects full time, my journalistic world feels much, much bigger. For that, I will be forever grateful.

Alexandra Zayas is an investigative reporter at the  Tampa Bay Times. In 2013, she won the Livingston Award for Young Journalists for her yearlong, three-part series “In God’s Name,” which uncovered abuse at unlicensed religious children’s homes across Florida. Zayas graduated from the University of Miami and has written for the Miami Herald and the Star Tribune in Minneapolis.