Despite challenges, both recent and longstanding, Bay Area journalism is thriving.
Every year, the all-volunteer San Francisco Press Club, an association of the region’s journalists, hosts an awards dinner honoring great stories from a wide array of newsrooms. The 48th Greater Bay Area Journalism Awards, presented on Dec. 9, recognized a gamut of news sources — from college campus papers, TV news, and large circulation dailies like the San Francisco Chronicle, to specialty publications like SF Classical Voice.
SFCV stories won recognition several times during the night. The awards were:
- First place, General News Story, “SF Symphony Chorus Faces Unprecedented Wage Cuts” (July 15, 2024) by Janos Gereben
- Second place, Breaking News Story, “Was a Strike Before the SF Symphony’s Opener Inevitable?” (Sept. 20, 2024) by Janos Gereben
- Third place, Entertainment Review, “Stars Align at SF Symphony for Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Cello Concerto” (Oct. 21, 2024) by Rebecca Wishnia
Most significantly, Janos Gereben, who has contributed to SF Classical Voice since its inception in 1998, won the 2025 Bill Workman Award for lifetime achievement. The award is named in memory of the San Mateo-based local reporter who was president of the Peninsula Press Club (now renamed the San Francisco Press Club). Sponsored by the Chronicle, the award honors Workman’s spirit and old-school beat reporting.
Gereben is cast from Workman’s mold. Born in 1937, Gereben studied music in his native Hungary, and later studied musicology with Laszlo Somfai, a groundbreaking scholar of Bela Bartok’s music.
He left Hungary several years after the failed revolution of 1956 and started his journalistic career in earnest as a copy boy for the New York Herald-Tribune. When that paper closed, he spent several years at TIME-LIFE and UPI Audio, before moving west. In Hawai’i, he published the Kona Torch, reported for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, and taught journalism at the University of Hawai’i-Manoa.
In the Bay Area, Gereben served as arts editor of the Post Newspaper Group/East Bay for 20 years and wrote arts criticism for the San Francisco Examiner. Along with his other work, Gereben began contributing to SF Classical Voice when Robert Commanday established the publication in 1998, and Gereben has worked for the publication since. His stories appear in SFCV weekly and are the backbone of the journal’s news reporting.
