Freddy Brewster is now a Madisonian.

Dear Friends o’ the LoCO: Please be advised that the Outpost’s Freddy Brewster has been officially recognized as awesome by the Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, which today announced him as a recipient of its annual James Madison Freedom of Information Awards!

A lot of journalism awards are kind of bogus. This one is not bogus.

Freddy was honored in the “Student Journalism” category, as we share him with Humboldt State for the time being. (The difference being that we pay Freddy, and Freddy pays them.) He was recognized principally for work he did for you right here on the LoCO — namely, his investigation into how and why the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office has censored social media content critical of its operations, and whether or not it can legally do that.

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Here’s what the SPJ’s Freedom of Information committee had to say about Freddy’s work:

Brewster, an undergraduate student at Humboldt State University, harnessed public records to publish wide-ranging public interest journalism in both student and professional publications last year. His reporting, based on hundreds of pages of public documents, revealed that the Humboldt County sheriff’s office had suppressed online comments from community members critical of the agency’s handling of a high-profile homicide investigation, which had become the backbone of the popular Netflix documentary “Murder Mountain.” Brewster also showed how university police had issued dubious citations to students following the legalization of marijuana possession in California.

Freddy shares the award with a team from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism that used new public information laws to research Kern County police officers who had previously been fired or sued for misconduct and/or convicted of a crime.

Our man will receive his medallion at the organization’s 35th annual Freedom of Information Dinner in San Francisco next month, where he will meet and mingle with his fellow members of the Madison Award Class of 2020 — people like famed investigative reporter David Weir, Oakland A’s pitcher (and sign-stealing whistleblower) Mike Fiers, state assemblymember Phil Ting, and many more.

All hail the rise of Freddy!