The Thread wins 2026 Online Journalism Award for Excellence in AI Innovation
HEATDRAWN Media’s independent obituary project won the Small/Medium Newsroom division, announced Sept. 3 by the Online News Association
LOS ANGELES — HEATDRAWN Media’s The Thread has won the 2026 Online Journalism Award for Excellence in AI Innovation, Small/Medium Newsroom. The Online News Association announced the winner Sept. 3 during a virtual ceremony.
Judges said the winning project had “a really innovative idea that uses AI to find patterns across obituaries and turn them into meaningful cultural journalism. Using data as a jumping-off point for deeper reporting, The Thread offers a thoughtful new way to surface connections across individual lives and engage readers in making sense of them.”
Published from December 2024 through December 2025, The Thread was a yearlong journalism experiment that used generative AI to identify patterns across 100 to 200 obituaries of ordinary people each week. Those patterns became the foundation for curated digital exhibitions examining work, family, migration, grief, joy, memory and the ways people are remembered after death.
The Thread began as a proposal HEATDRAWN founder and executive producer Ethan Ward developed for a newsroom AI role he interviewed for and did not get. He built the project independently instead.
“This project scared me. Nothing like it existed, so I couldn’t point at anything when people asked what I was making, and plenty of them told me not to make it because it involved obituaries,” Ward said.
“Seeing it recognized this way, after it was already finished, means a lot,” he said. “One of my former journalism professors announced the category at the ceremony.”
The project addressed a problem of scale. A single journalist could not manually read and cross-reference hundreds of obituaries each week for connections across geography, profession, age and life experience. AI surfaced those connections. Human editorial judgment governed the reporting. Obituaries were selected at random, without filtering for fame, wealth or status, so that a bus driver’s legacy received the same attention as a chief executive’s.
Ward produced all 39 issues. He verified AI-generated observations against original obituary sources, conducted original interviews with funeral directors, archivists and genealogists, hyperlinked the primary obituaries in each exhibition and made every final editorial and publishing decision.
The Thread also drew explicit lines around what AI would not do. It was never used to write exhibitions autonomously, and never used to generate likenesses of the people it covered. Echo Weaver, the project’s host and curatorial voice, was an AI editorial persona, and was disclosed as one on the project’s About page. When readers began writing in with questions about the project’s use of AI in its first weeks, Ward published a Member’s Guide and FAQ page documenting the project’s methods and its AI-generated art policy.
“Echo Weaver’s appearance is modeled on my cousin Yolanda, who died in 2017,” Ward said. “It didn’t dawn on me until this week that I also spent a year keeping her memory alive. She would be so proud.”
The Excellence in AI Innovation award recognizes newsrooms and journalists using generative artificial intelligence in innovative ways to advance newsgathering, accessibility, productivity or audience engagement. Entries are evaluated on whether their use of AI addresses an identified need, creatively applies the technology, preserves human agency in its design and improves the human experience.
The other finalists in the Small/Medium Newsroom division were “Decoding Climate Discourse: AI-Driven Analysis of Editorials,” from Clif, and “ELNC — Using AI To Improve Translations,” from Enlace Latino NC. The Wall Street Journal won the Large Newsroom division for “Surfacing the Story: How WSJ’s ORCA Unlocks the Podcast Universe.”
Launched in 2000, the Online Journalism Awards recognize work across major international media organizations, independent newsrooms and individual journalists. Winners are selected through a two-stage review that begins with screening by journalism and digital media professionals and concludes with deliberations by panels of senior-level journalism professionals. Winners in 16 of the 28 categories were announced Sept. 3. The remaining winners will be honored at the 2026 Online Journalism Awards Gala on Oct. 1 at City Winery in New York City.
The award follows The Thread’s2026 Communicator Award and adds to a growing body of honors for HEATDRAWN projects. The studio’s work has also been recognized by the LA Press Club and the Housing Narrative Lab, and has received support from the Omidyar Network Tech Journalism Fund.
The Thread’s complete 39-issue archive remains available at followthethread.beehiiv.com.
View the winning entry at the Online Journalism Awards
About HEATDRAWN Media
HEATDRAWN was founded in 2020 by journalist and executive producer Ethan Ward. The studio develops original reporting and narrative projects examining power, culture and belonging across publishing, audio, screen and digital platforms. Its projects include INHERITANCE, a magazine about race, culture, money, power and what gets passed down, recognized by the LA Press Club and the Communicator Awards; REPUTATION, an award-winning limited series podcast on homelessness and housing policy; and THE THREAD, an AI-powered digital museum exploring obituary data, memory and legacy. HEATDRAWN has been supported by the Omidyar Network Tech Journalism Fund.
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