Journalists from The New York Times, The New Yorker and ProPublica were among the winners of the George Polk Awards, which were announced on Monday.
Long Island University, the home of the awards, selected the winners from 493 submissions of work published in 2024, many of which focused on reports from wars and conflict zones and health and medical investigations. The New York Times won three Polk Awards, the most of any publication.
“Given the range and depth of exceptional and occasionally remarkable reporting before us, winnowing the list to these 15 meant making some very hard calls,” said John Darnton, the curator of the awards. “These winners represent the best of the best.”
Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti of The New York Times Magazine won the foreign reporting award for “The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel,” a nearly 14,000-word investigation into half a century of Israeli authorities ignoring or condoning violence by ultranationalists against Palestinians.
Declan Walsh and the staff of The New York Times were given the prize for war reporting for their ongoing coverage of devastation and destruction from the civil war in Sudan, including revealing that the United Arab Emirates was using a humanitarian effort in the country as cover while secretly funneling weapons to the side it supported.
The national reporting prize went to Katherine Eban, a special correspondent for Vanity Fair, for “Inside the Bungled Bird Flu Response, Where Profits Collide With Public Health,” which examined why a key government agency was slow to respond to the bird flu outbreak.
The Baltimore Banner’s Alissa Zhu, Nick Thieme and Jessica Gallagher won the local reporting award for an investigation that compiled data to show that Baltimore had become the drug overdose capital of the United States, with a death rate from 2018 to 2022 nearly double that of any other large city. Their work was a collaboration with The New York Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship, which is a one-year fellowship program for young journalists from local newsrooms. It was also published in The Times.
Sara DiNatale of The San Antonio Express-News was awarded the state reporting prize for a four-part series that exposed how some door-to-door sellers of rooftop solar energy in Texas had scammed homeowners, leaving them with damaged roofs, expensive loans and false promises of rebates.
The health care reporting award went to Bob Herman, Tara Bannow, Casey Ross and Lizzy Lawrence of STAT for the investigative series “Health Care’s Colossus,” which examined how UnitedHealth Group wielded its dominance to increase its profits and exposed the conflicts of its reach inside every aspect of the health care system.
Kavitha Surana, Lizzie Presser, Cassandra Jaramillo and Stacy Kranitz from ProPublica won the medical reporting award for their investigation that used hospital records and death certificates in Texas and Georgia to uncover the preventable deaths of at least five women who were denied care under abortion bans.
Jane Mayer of The New Yorker won the political reporting prize for “Pete Hegseth’s Secret History,” her investigation into Mr. Hegseth, who is now the U.S. secretary of defense. Her reporting revealed that he had previously been forced out of leadership positions in advocacy groups over allegations of financial mismanagement, sexist behavior and intoxication.
Two alumnae of the investigative reporting program at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, Katey Rusch and Casey Smith, were awarded the justice reporting prize for the two-part series “Right to Remain Secret,” which was published by The San Francisco Chronicle. Their investigation revealed a secret system of legal settlements that allowed California police officers to cover up misconduct on their records and find new jobs in law enforcement.
The technology reporting award went to Olivia Carville and Cecilia D’Anastasio of Bloomberg Businessweek for exposing how predators groomed children on the gaming platform Roblox. After their reporting, Roblox announced that it would require parents to monitor the online activity of preteens.
Rachel Aviv of The New Yorker won the magazine reporting award for “Alice Munro’s Passive Voice,” her 20,000-word article examining why the celebrated author stayed silent when confronted with her partner’s sexual abuse of her daughter, but used the abuse to transform her fiction.
The national television reporting award went to Mike Hixenbaugh, Jon Schuppe, Liz Kreutz and the late Susan Carroll of NBC News and Noticias Telemundo for “Dealing the Dead,” which uncovered how a Texas medical school sold the body parts of corpses for research and education while making little effort to find the individual’s family to get consent.
Marcia Biggs, Eric O’Connor and André Paultre of the PBS NewsHour won the foreign television reporting award for “Haiti in Crisis.” The journalists traveled to Haiti to show the grim extent of the devastation and barbarism wrought by the gang warfare that has sown chaos in the country’s capital, Port-au-Prince.
The podcast award was given to Ben Austen and Bill Healy of Audible for “The Parole Room,” which went behind the scenes of the 20th parole hearing for Johnnie Veal, an inmate who was convicted of murdering two police officers in 1970 but has maintained his innocence.
The Sydney Schanberg Prize, which honors long-form investigative journalism, was awarded to Sarah A. Topol of The New York Times Magazine for “The Deserter,” a five-part epic following a Russian soldier who defected during the war on Ukraine and fled Russia for his life and his love.
