Nicholas Gilmore, a Cicero native who graduated from Hamilton Heights High School and Ball State University, won awards in two categories at Saturday’s New Mexico Press Association Awards for his work as a reporter for the Rio Grande Sun weekly newspaper in Española, N.M.
Gilmore won second place in both the News Writing and Investigative Journalism categories for his recent news stories, “A Sustained Crisis for Local Sikhs” and “City Police Purchase Facial Recognition Technology,” respectively. The 2022 coverage concerned a decades-long pattern of sex abuse in an American Sikh community based in northern New Mexico and the local police department’s quiet acquisition of powerful surveillance technology from a controversial artificial intelligence company.
Gilmore began reporting at the Sun in October 2021 after working as a staff writer at The Saturday Evening Post magazine in Indianapolis for four years. In September, he moved to the daily Santa Fe New Mexican to cover state utility regulation and local government in Santa Fe, N.M.