CTN received another award for its service to the Haitian community in the United States.
Caribbean Television Network has won the 2026 LION Publishers Community Engagement Award, a national recognition among independent publishers, for reporting produced for the Haitian diaspora during a period of acute immigration uncertainty. LION announced the honor at its Sustainability Awards ceremony in San Diego, where CTN won in the category’s micro/small revenue tier—newsrooms with less than $500,000 in annual revenue—according to LION Publishers.
The award recognized a body of practical, decision-ready reporting: an explainer on eligibility for a Massachusetts Real ID and Standard Driver’s License; a Know Your Rights guide for encounters with immigration agents; and a series on what to know before crossing into Canada. Each piece was produced in English, French, and Haitian Creole and distributed across video, the web, newsletters, and social platforms, LION noted.
Rather than treat immigration policy in the abstract, the reporting focused on the questions CTN’s audience was actually asking, in the languages they speak.
LION’s judges singled out that approach.
They described CTN’s listening process as well documented, pointing to named locations, named court cases and community questions that traced directly to specific stories, and called publishing in three languages central to how the newsroom operates. Helping community members connect directly with congressional offices, the judges wrote, “goes beyond what most newsrooms would do.”
The prize was one of 17 awarded at the 2026 LION Sustainability Awards, held during the Independent News Sustainability Summit in San Diego. Fifty-eight LION member finalists were honored across 10 categories in the eighth year of the awards program, according to LION.
Community Manager Natalie Van Hoozer opened the winner announcements, with support from the Center for Community Media at CUNY and Google, and Executive Director Chris Krewson closed the ceremony by recognizing 11 members that have reached the “sustaining” stage of LION’s maturity model — organizations the group considers to have built durable financial and operational footing.
Across eight years of the program, LION said, its panel of judges keeps returning to the same observation: that independent newsrooms are “meeting the moment with creative, thoughtful solutions” even as the media landscape grows more difficult.
For small, independent outlets, that recognition carries outsized weight. CTN competed and won in a tier defined by lean budgets, where newsrooms serve their communities on a fraction of the resources available to legacy media. The award affirms a model built not on scale but on trust, language access and closeness to the audience — the qualities that define much of the independent and community-media field.
CTN shared the stage this year with newsrooms across the country pursuing similar community-first missions. In the same category’s larger-revenue tier, the Kansas City Defender was honored for turning its coverage of a shuttered neighborhood grocery store into a Black-led free-food program. Other winners included Conecta Arizona and Block Club Chicago, both recognized for public-service reporting tied to immigration enforcement; LOOKOUT and the Florida Trib, named Businesses of the Year; and Te Lo Cuento News, honored for its transformation into a newsroom serving migrant communities across the Midwest, according to LION.
For CTN, the honor validates the mission it has pursued since its founding: serving the Haitian and Caribbean diaspora in its own languages, with journalism the community can use. The newsroom intends to keep the work pointed in the same direction — guided, as the judges observed, by the questions its audience brings to it.
This article was originally written in English. Other language versions are produced using AI translation software, and errors are possible — the English version is authoritative. CTN also uses AI to convert text into audio.
https://ctninfo.com/ctn-wins-nationa…unity-journalism/
