Sacramento Press Club honors 2 longtime Bee journalists, names scholarships after them
Four local journalists, each decades into their careers, are being honored by the Sacramento Press Club, which announced this week that it is naming scholarships in each of their names this year.
The honorees include Sacramento Bee reporter Dale Kasler and longtime Bee and McClatchy Co. photojournalist Hector Amezcua, who departed from the newsroom last summer and is now a multimedia specialist at UC Davis.
Kasler, whom the Press Club called “one of California’s top water and environment reporters,” has been with The Bee for 23 years.
“This is a terrific honor,” Kasler said Friday. “I’m not sure it’s justified, but I thank them very much.”
Kasler has covered a broad spectrum of local issues and breaking news over the years, and “briefly became part of the story in 2019 when police detained Kasler and other journalists covering a protest over the shooting death of Stephon Clark,” the Press Club wrote.
A photo of Kasler in handcuffs, restrained by Sacramento Police, was taken by The Bee’s other recent honoree, Amezcua.
Amezcua spent two decades at The Sacramento Bee during his almost-30-year tenure with McClatchy, which started in 1992 at The Modesto Bee.
“His keen eyes capture the humanity of his subjects,” the Press Club wrote of Amezcua, who continues to work as a freelance visual journalist in the Sacramento area in addition to his role at UC Davis.
The Press Club elected this year to name four of its seven scholarship awards in honor of journalists who are currently working in the field. Joining Kasler and Amezcua are Beth Ruyak, the host of Capital Public Radio’s Insight program; and Lonnie Wong, whose roles as anchor and reporter at Channel 40 go back 40 years to 1980, six years before FOX was founded and when KTXL was branded on-air as Fox 40.
The Sacramento Press Club in 2020 is awarding the seven scholarships to college journalism students with Sacramento connections. The scholarships range from $4,000 to $8,000 and will total at least $35,000.
To be eligible, applicants must be college juniors, seniors or graduate students for at least one term in the 2020-21 academic year; must have a “connection” to the nine-county greater Sacramento region (Sacramento, Yolo, San Joaquin, El Dorado, Placer, Sutter, Yuba, Nevada and Butte counties). The connection includes students who are from the region originally, who are enrolled in a college or university in the region, or who can show a demonstrated interest in covering news in the region.
The deadline for qualifying students to apply for these scholarships is March 31.
This story was originally published March 13, 2020 at 11:54 AM.
