AL.com journalists win national Polk Award for Brookside reporting

The New York Times won 3 George Polk Awards, two for its coverage of the war in Ukraine and ane for an investigation into Hasidic Jewish schools in New York that denied students a bones education.

On Monday, Long Isle Academy, which has run the prestigious Polk Awards for journalism since 1949, announced winners in 15 categories chosen from 515 submissions. A special honour went to the youngest ever recipient of a Polk.

“Interestingly, a lot of reporters went after large, thematic stories, like the role of private equity companies in buying up hospitals, private homes and flat complexes,” John Darnton, the curator of the awards, said in a statement. “And the war in Ukraine produced superb war reporting, done at great peril.”

The Times won the prize for foreign reporting. That submission included daily reporting on the state of war in Ukraine besides equally a characteristic by Roger Cohen on President Vladimir V. Putin’s “22-year slide from statesman to tyrant” in Russia. The Times’due south submission also included “Putin’s War,” a 13,000-discussion, two-month investigation that exposed Russian federation’s powerful military as unprepared, ill-equipped and badly managed.

The Times besides won the education reporting award for work by Eliza Shapiro and Brian M. Rosenthal that exposed how private schools in New York’s Hasidic Jewish customs were failing to provide students with an adequate education, despite receiving more than a quarter of a billion dollars in public funds annually.

Lynsey Addario of The Times won the photojournalism honour for a photo that captured the horror in Ukraine. In the photo, the bodies of a Ukrainian mother, her 2 children and a family unit friend lay on the ground after they were killed by Russian mortar fire while trying to abscond Ukraine. The citation for the accolade noted that Ms. Addario “dove for encompass as the shell landed and then took the gruesome photograph on instinct.”

The award for war reporting was given to Mstyslav Chernov, Evgeniy Maloletka, Vasilisa Stepanenko and Lori Hinnant of The Associated Press. The A.P. was the last remaining Western news arrangement in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol after information technology came nether burn from Russia, and the team of journalists documented the siege for almost three weeks before escaping.

The national reporting award went to Josh Gerstein, Alex Ward, Peter Canellos and the staff of Politico for their stunning scoop on a rare leak from the Supreme Court: a draft of the ruling that would overturn Roe v. Wade, upending the constitutional right to abortion subsequently nearly 50 years. The official decision from the court came less than two months later. Politico connected its reporting with articles that examined the court’s conservative majority and its hunt for the leaker of the draft.

John Archibald, Ashley Remkus and Ramsey Archibald of the news website AL.com won the prize for local reporting for an investigation into how the police force force of the tiny town of Brookside, Ala., preyed on poorer residents with an aggressive increase in traffic citations and vehicle seizures, resulting in 640 percent growth in the town’s revenues over two years.

The Reuters series “Undocumented and Underage,” by Joshua Schneyer, Mica Rosenberg and Kristina Cooke, which besides focused on Alabama, won for land reporting. The Reuters team revealed the widespread utilise of migrant children for illegal labor at factories that supply machine parts to Hyundai and Kia, as well as at chicken plants.

The health reporting award went to Kendall Taggart, John Templon, Anthony Cormier and Jason Leopold of BuzzFeed News for their investigation into the dire conditions at a chain of grouping homes for people with disabilities subsequently information technology was bought past KKR, a individual equity firm.

Ian Allison and Tracy Wang from the online cryptocurrency publication CoinDesk won the financial reporting honor for their piece of work in exposing issues in the human relationship between Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange FTX and his trading firm, Alameda Research. The article set in motion the rapid implosion of both firms, and days later, FTX filed for bankruptcy. FTX customers and traders take lost billions of dollars, and Mr. Bankman-Fried is facing federal fraud charges.

A vi-part series, “The Amazon, Undone,” by Terrence McCoy of The Washington Post, won the environmental reporting prize. It illuminated the ways in which Brazil has failed to protect the rainforest, pushing information technology to the brink of destruction.

The justice reporting award went to Brett Murphy of ProPublica for his investigation into the pseudoscience of “911 call analysis,” which claims to assess a caller’s guilt based on spoken communication patterns. His articles pointed to more than 100 cases in 26 states where the technique was used in criminal cases.

The prize for political reporting went to Sarah Blaskey, Nicholas Nehamas, Ana Ceballos, Mary Ellen Klas and the staff of the Miami Herald for their manufactures examining how refugees were lured under false pretenses onto flights from Texas to Martha’due south Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts, nether the direction of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.

The foreign television receiver laurels went to Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Kavitha Chekuru and Laila Al-Arian for “The Killing of Shireen Abu Akleh,” a segment on Al Jazeera English’s Fault Lines program. The team examined the shooting death by the Israeli military of Ms. Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American announcer who was reporting in the W Bank.

Shimon Prokupecz, a senior crime and justice correspondent for CNN, and his crew were honored for national television reporting for their coverage of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that claimed the lives of nineteen children and two teachers, and of law enforcement’southward delay in challenging the gunman.

A special award was given to Theo Bakery, a student at Stanford Academy and a reporter for The Stanford Daily, for uncovering allegations that some research papers co-written by Stanford University’south president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, independent manipulated images. The university is at present investigating the allegations. Mr. Baker, 18, is the son of two journalists — Peter Baker of The New York Times and Susan B. Glasser of The New Yorker, and is the youngest recipient of a Polk Award, according to Mr. Darnton.

The Sydney H. Schanberg prize, which honors long-form investigative journalism, was awarded to Alex Perry, a freelance announcer who chronicled a 2021 ISIS attack in a remote town in Mozambique for Outside magazine.