The New York Times wins 3 Polk Awards

The New York Times won three George Polk Awards on Monday, including two for its coverage of the war between Israel and Hamas. These awards were among five honoring journalism on this conflict and the war in Ukraine.

Long Island University, home of the journalism awards, announced winners in 13 categories, selected from 497 submissions of work completed in 2023.

“As horrific as the outbreak of war in the Middle East and the ongoing fighting in Ukraine has been, they have provided us with magnificent reporting, done at great risk to their lives, to choose from,” said John Darnton, curator long-standing Polk Awards. said in a statement.

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Polk Awards, which will be celebrated with an event in April inviting all past winners. Sixteen will be honored as George Polk Career Laureates, including Dean Baquet, former executive editor of The New York Times; Nikole Hannah-Jones, editor at Times Magazine; Christiane Amanpour, CNN chief international correspondent; and former Washington Post editor Martin Baron. The awards are named after CBS journalist George Polk, who was killed in 1948 while covering the Greek Civil War.

The New York Times team received the Foreign Reporting Award for its coverage of the war between Israel and Hamas, which included in-depth reporting on Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7 and Israel’s aggressive military response in Gaza. Times reporters showed that Israel had known about Hamas’ attack plan for more than a year, but ignored warnings and was ill-prepared.

The Times’ Samar Abu Elouf and Yousef Masoud won the photojournalism prize for their photographs of the conflict inside Gaza, capturing the horrific toll of Israeli airstrikes on civilians, including the death and injury of many children.

The Times also shared an award for podcasting. Daniel Guillemette of Times-owned Serial Productions, along with Meribah Knight of WPLN Nashville and Ken Armstrong of ProPublica were recognized for their four-part podcast, “The Kids of Rutherford County.” The series explores how hundreds, if not thousands, of children were illegally imprisoned in Tennessee, a practice overseen by a powerful judge and left unchecked for more than a decade.

The National Reporting Award went to Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, Alex Mierjeski, Brett Murphy and ProPublica staff for developer the lavish gifts and luxury trips given to Justice Clarence Thomas by a billionaire Republican donor, Harlan Crow. The ProPublica team also examined other relationships between Supreme Court justices and influential benefactors and the ethical questions they raise.

Jesse Coburn, a reporter for the nonprofit Streetsblog NYC, won the local reporting award for a seven-month period. investigation in New York’s underground market for temporary license plates that drivers use to avoid tolls and tickets and escape accountability for more serious crimes.

The state reporting award went to Chris Osher and Julia Cardi of The Gazette, a Colorado Springs newspaper. The two men examined Colorado child care system, showing that advice from unqualified parental evaluators led to four deaths of young children. Their reporting led to changes in state law and a criminal investigation by the Colorado Attorney General’s Office.

The Reuters team won the business journalism award for its investigations into companies owned by Elon Musk, which revealed a series of workplace accidents as well as a death at EspaceXmistreatment of laboratory animals Neural link and disappointment in the face of chronic vehicle breakdowns You’re here.

The medical reporting prize was awarded to two different applications. Anna Werner of CBS News, along with KFF Health News reporters Brett Kelman, Fred Schulte, Holly K. Hacker and Daniel Chang, won for “In case of malfunction of medical devices,” a yearlong investigation into medical devices such as hip implants and heart pumps that the Food and Drug Administration had designated as safe but are suspected of contributing to patient injuries and deaths.

Michael D. Sallah, Michael Korsh and Evan Robinson-Johnson of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, along with Debbie Cenziper of ProPublica, won the medical reporting award for the series “With every breath”, which revealed that Philips Respironics, which makes popular breathing devices, continued to market its products for years despite internal warnings about a dangerous defect.

Brian Howey won the Courts Journalism Award for his investigation in a California police practice of collecting information from the families of people killed by police before relatives are notified of the death. The expose, which Mr. Howey began while a student in the investigative reporting program at the University of California, Berkeley, was published by the Los Angeles Times and expanded into part of a podcast by Reveal, from the Center for Investigative Reporting.

The New Yorker’s Luke Mogelson received the magazine’s reporting award for “Two weeks at the front in Ukraine», his account of the war from the trenches, where he joined a Ukrainian battalion in the Donbass. The television reporting award went to Julia Steers and Amel Guettatfi of Vice News for their coverage of Russian Wagner Group mercenaries in Ukraine and the Central African Republic.

New York writer Masha Gessen won the commentary prize for the essay “In the shadow of the Holocaust”, which examined German memory of the Holocaust and compared the situation in Gaza to the Jewish ghettos of Nazi-occupied Europe.

The Sydney Schanberg Prize for Long Form Journalism was awarded to Rolling Stone’s Jason Motlagh, who integrated with rival gang leaders in Haiti to cover the brutal gang war that is forcing thousands of Haitians to flee the country as it descends into violence and anarchy.