Religion News Association Thanks the Judges of the 2026 Excellence in Religion Reporting Awards
The Religion News Association thanks the judges of the 2026 Excellence in Religion Reporting Awards for their time, care and professional expertise. Each year, current and former journalists and journalism educators give their time to review submissions and recognize the best work being done in religion reporting across print, audio, video and digital journalism.
At the request of members and following recommendations from the 2026 contest ad hoc subcommittee, RNA is sharing the names of this year’s judges for the first time to increase transparency in the judging process. However, RNA does not disclose which categories individual judges evaluated.
The judges for 2026 were:
Mike Deeson: Mike Deeson is a 12-time Emmy winning Investigative Reporter and the only broadcast journalist in the state to be honored by the Society of Professional Journalists as the Florida Journalist of the Year. In all Deeson has been nominated for more than 40 Emmy Awards. Deeson was also honored with the lifetime achievement Silver Circle Award from the National Academy of Arts and Science (NATAS) is a six-time winner of the Green Eyeshade Award ( the oldest journalism competition in the Southeast sponsored by the Atlanta Chapter of SPJ); a two-time winner of the Edward R. Murrow Award and winer of more than 50 Associated Press and United Press International Awards including top broadcast journalist of the year at least once in 4 decades. He was also chosen as the Outstanding Reporter in the Southeast. In 2015 Influence magazine named Deeson one of the 100 most influential people affecting Florida Politics. Deeson is also an Emmy nominated BMI songwriter who spent 15 years as the regional coordinator of the Nashville Songwriters Association International (NSAI). He has more than 500 songs in his catalogue. After retiring from WTSP TV in 2017 after 35 years as the station’s senior investigative reporter, Deeson founded Deeson Media, an investigative documentary company. He has produced several documentaries including “Broken” a two-year project about elephants being abused in circuses, “Lifetime Alimony” about Florida’s regressive alimony laws, “125 Years of Worship” and several others. Deeson is also the Secretary/Treasured of the Florida First Amendment Foundation. A graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, Deeson has lived in Tampa since 1982 and is married to wife Laurie and has two children and two grandchildren all of whom live in Tampa.
Jeff Diamant: Jeff Diamant is a senior writer/editor at Pew Research Center, focusing on religion. He has worked on reports about the faith of Black Americans, Muslim Americans and Europeans. He has a doctorate in history from the CUNY Graduate Center, was a fellow in the Scholars-in-Residence program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and received a bachelor’s degree from Yale University in political science and international studies. Prior to joining the Center, he also worked as a journalist for newspapers including the Newark Star-Ledger and the Charlotte Observer.
Sandi Dolbee: Sandi Dolbee is the former (now retired) religion and ethics editor of The San Diego Union-Tribune. She has 50 years of experience writing and editing for newspapers, starting out in high school when she was a stringer covering sports for a local newspaper (she was paid by the column inch and became a fervent devotee of writing long). Sandi is the recipient of multiple national and local journalism awards. She also is a past RNA president and honoree for her religion reporting and writing.
Aristide Economopoulos: Aristide Economopoulos is a freelance photographer based in the New York metropolitan area with over two decades of experience at NJ Advance Media/The Star-Ledger, where he specialized in documentary essays covering international conflict, urban violence, natural disasters, politics, community news, and sports. An eight-time Photographer of the Year with the New York Press Photographers Association, his work has earned recognition from World Press Photo, Sony World Photo Awards, Pictures of the Year International, and the National Press Photographers Association among others. His 2025 portfolio received second runner-up for National Photographer of the Year in NPPA's Best of Photojournalism. In 2005, he was part of the team awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting. His portfolio from the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks won first place in Pictures of the Year International, and Photo District News named one of his photographs from that day among the decade's best documentary images. His work is permanently displayed at The National September 11 Memorial Museum. Economopoulos has exhibited internationally and lectured at institutions including the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. A graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology, he resides in Jersey City, New Jersey.
Tim Funk: A Kentucky native, Tim Funk received a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and began his reporting career at the Anniston (Alabama) Star. At the Charlotte Observer, where he worked for 35 years, his beats included faith & values, politics (in the newspaper’s Washington and Raleigh bureaus), TV & radio, and race & immigration. As the Observer’s religion reporter for a dozen years, he covered everything from Billy Graham’s last hometown crusade in Charlotte to a joint interfaith pilgrimage to Israel by a Reform synagogue and a liberal Baptist church. He also traveled to Lourdes to report on a local Catholic’s search for a cure to his impending blindness. And he broke the story of two daughters’ campaign to remove the picture of their father — a convicted pedophile — from a place of honor at a Charlotte area Methodist church. Among his awards: One from the Religion Newswriters Association for stories about Franklin Graham’s decision to accept combined salaries from two nonprofits totaling nearly $900,000. Funk’s work has also appeared in The Assembly, a digital magazine in North Carolina, where he writes about the intersection of religion and politics.
Ari Goldman: Ari Goldman, a former religion correspondent for The New York Times, is a professor emeritus at Columbia University. At Columbia, he created and taught the Covering Religion course that trained hundreds of religion writers, including numerous members (and leaders) of RNA. He is the author of four books, including a best-selling memoir, “The Search for God at Harvard.” In 2020, he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from RNA.
Liz Kineke: Liz Kineke is a writer and documentary producer in New York City. For 14 years she covered religion for CBS and her written work has appeared in Tricycle: the Buddhist Review and RNS. She was a producer on the feature-length documentary Speak, a 2025 Sundance selection.
Steve Levin: Steve Levin has a diverse career spanning five decades in journalism. He served as editor and reporter at newspapers in Dallas, Pittsburgh, Bakersfield, Raleigh, Austin and Santa Rosa. He was a writer for Newsweek, People, Southwest Airlines, University of Pittsburgh alumni magazine and others. He is the author of eight nonfiction and fiction books and is a writing coach at NerdWallet. He served as city editor with Santa Rosa Press Democrat when the staff was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News. He has summited Mt. McKinley, Alaska and Imja Tse, Nepal.
Irene Maher: Irene Maher is a retired award winning medical reporter who spent 23 years at WFLA TV in Tampa, Florida and more than ten years as a staff writer and correspondent at the Tampa Bay Times in St. Petersburg, Florida. Early in her career she worked in radio news in Norfolk, Virginia and spent 3 years at Norfolk’s WAVY TV as a medical reporter and weekend weather caster. She now lives in Northern Colorado where she and her husband enjoy the cool, rarely humid weather, gorgeous mountain views, and, of course, keeping an eye on the latest news headlines and the people behind them.
Suzanne Pavkovic: Suzanne Pavkovic is a veteran award-winning journalist. She most recently served as Director of Investigations and Enterprise for The Star-Ledger and nj.com, overseeing countless projects and investigations that exposed fraud and achieved impact across many fields, including education, immigration, crime and religion. During the pandemic, she launched a series of investigative stories on problems in nursing homes that resulted in new laws being passed to safeguard residents. She has also directed the coverage of hundreds of breaking news stories during her decades-long career, from a fatal dormitory fire, to Superstorm Sandy, to 9/11. Coverage she led on two breaking news events were named as Pulitzer Prize finalists.
Kimberly Winston: Kimberly Winston has been a religion reporter for over 30 years. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Five-Thirty-Eight and on NPR.org among many others. Her reporting has taken her to Belgium, Bosnia, Kosovo, Pakistan, Israel and Malaysia. She currently covers religion in the news for ARC magazine.
Gayle White: Gayle White worked as a reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for more than three decades. She helped launch and was senior writer for the newspaper’s national award-winning Faith and Values section. She is a two-time winner of the Reporter of the Year Award from The Religion Newswriters Association, and is a past RNA president. For the 2004 presidential campaign, she created a beat called “values and voter groups,” and was honored with a national Clarion Award from The Association for Women in Communication. She wrote Believers and Beliefs, a book about the doctrine and etiquette of various faiths. As a free-lancer after retirement, she won the top writing award for religious magazines given by the Religion Communicators Council.
To see the full list of 2026 Excellence in Religion Reporting Award winners, click here.
