George Polk Awards in Journalism | |
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Awarded for | To honor excellence in print and broadcast journalism |
Country | United States |
Presented by | Long Island University |
First awarded | 1949 |
Official website | http://www.liu.edu/polk/ |
The George Polk Awards in Journalism are a series of prestigious American journalism awards presented annually by Long Island University in New York in the United States. A writer for Idea Lab, a group blog hosted on the website of PBS, described the award as "one of only a couple of journalism prizes that means anything".
The awards were established in 1949 in memory of George Polk, a CBS correspondent who was murdered in 1948 while covering the Greek Civil War (1946–49). In 2009 former New York Times editor John Darnton was named curator of the George Polk Awards.
See list of George Polk Award winners for award recipients.
Josh Marshall's blog, Talking Points Memo, was the first blog to receive the Polk Award in 2008 for their reporting on the 2006 U.S. Attorneys scandal.
Winners of the 2015 awards include:Simeon Booker, of Jet Magazine who reported on the U. S. Civil Rights movement for more than half a century is the recipient of the George Polk Career Award.
The National Reporting award was given to The Washington Post for an exhaustive study of killings by police officers. Jamie Kalven of Invisible Institute received the award for Local Reporting for "Sixteen Shots," published online by Slate Magazine, about the October 2014 police shooting death of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. In contrast to police reports of the event, Kalven's investigation obtained the boy's autopsy report and pressed for release of a video of the incident. The Washington Post's Terrance McCoy won the award for Regional Reporting for his series on companies that buy the rights to court-ordered compensation for a fraction of their value. Nicholas Kulish, Christopher Drew, Mark Mazzetti, Matthew Rosenberg, Serge F. Kovaleski, Sean Naylor, and John Ismay received the award for Military Reporting for The New York Times for an investigation showing that elite U.S. Navy SEAL teams took on far broader roles than ever publicly acknowledged and often operated with little accountability.