About Me
Sona Patel is a Producer for Social Media at seattletimes.com, the online home of The Seattle Times. She joined The Times in November 2009. She is part of the team that won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting. It was the first time that online coverage was specifically mentioned in a Pulitzer citation.
Prior to that she was a reporter and Web producer for The Tribune, a 40,000-daily circulation McClatchy Co. newspaper in San Luis Obispo, Calif. Her beats included the city of Morro Bay, Cuesta College, and the towns of Los Osos and Cayucos. She was also a homepage producer for The Tribune’s Web site, SanLuisObispo.com. In 2009, Sona won first place in business writing in the AP California/Nevada journalism contest for a series she co-wrote on the decline of the fishing industry in Morro Bay. The three-part series compared the seaside town to the Northern California city of Eureka, which suffered financially as a result of similar decline.
Sona is a recipient of the 2011 Kiplinger Fellowship in Social Media at Ohio State University. In June 2009, she received a Donald W. Reynolds Foundation fellowship to attend the Maynard Institute’s six-week Multimedia Editing and Ethics in Journalism program at the University of Nevada, Reno.
In 2008, Sona received two prestigious fellowships for journalists. In May, she participated in the University of North Carolina’s Multimedia Boot camp — an intense, one-week multimedia workshop taught by journalism faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill, multimedia journalists from NPR, The New York Times and MSNBC. A month later she was awarded a fellowship for the Knight Digital Media Center’s Multimedia training for reporters in Berkeley, Calif. The one-week workshop taught mainly by faculty of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism specialized in teaching hands-on skills including Flash, Final Cut Pro, audio and video editing tools, storyboarding, and voiceover techniques. She returned to the Knight program in May 2010 to teach a workshop on Social Media for Reporters and Editors.
Before moving to San Luis Obispo in July 2006 , Sona spent two years as a reporter for Irvine Community Television where she covered community events in Orange County’s largest city and produced a feature-length documentary to commemorate the city’s 35th anniversary of achieving cityhood.
In her spare time, Sona covers community events for India West newspaper, a San Mateo-based weekly publication that focuses on news in the South Asian American communities of North America and California Lawyer magazine, a monthly publication focusing on legal trends in the state.
During college, Sona was selected to participate in a media trip to Taiwan, which was sponsored by the Taiwanese government, and was one of 12 college newspaper editors selected to spend two weeks in Israel and Poland as part of the Anti Defamation League’s Campus Editors Mission. She used that experience to help foster dialogue between Jewish and Muslim student groups at her alma mater, UC Irvine, and hold roundtable discussions promoting cultural and religious tolerance on college campuses in the U.S.
She graduated in 2006 with bachelor’s degrees in Literary Journalism and Spanish and a minor in Information and Computer Science. Sona served as Editor-in-Chief of the student newspaper, the New University (go Anteaters!) Under her leadership, the newspaper won several prestigious awards including a Best College Newspaper award from the Los Angeles Times in 2003.
In her spare time, Sona enjoys reading, cooking, traveling, Gujarati folk dance, tutoring English as a Second Language learners, and as of late 2009, exploring the beautiful Pacific Northwest.
Sona can be reached at: sona.patel[at]gmail.com. You can also find her on Facebook (facebook.com/sona.patel), LinkedIn, and Twitter (ID: sona23).