New Orleans newspaper honoured for reporting
Last Updated: Tuesday, February 21, 2006 | 4:51 PM ET
CBC Arts
The Times-Picayune, the New Orleans daily newspaper that went on publishing online as floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina flooded its headquarters, has won the 2005 George Polk Award for metropolitan reporting.
The George Polk Awards, among the most prestigious awards for journalism in the U.S., were announced by Long Island University in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Tuesday.
The Times-Picayune was lauded for serving as "a critical and accurate source of information for the battered New Orleans community and the world." It operated with a skeleton staff, many of whom lost their homes.
The paper's online edition and accompanying blogs were registering 30 million hits a day during the height of the disaster. When operations resumed four days after the storm, the first headline read, "Help Us, Please!"
The George Polk award is given in several categories and also to honour individual careers. Many of the 2005 award winners were writing about events emerging out of the war in Iraq and the war on terror.
The award for national reporting was won by Dana Priest of the Washington Post who unveiled the existence of secret CIA-run prisons and detailed the elaborate covert prison operations in a series of articles.
ABC News correspondent Brian Ross and reporter Richard Esposito won the television reporting award for their exposé of the treatment the CIA was giving to prisoners in secret detention facilities.
Chicago Tribune reporter Cam Simpson and photographer José More won the award for international reporting after investigating the massacre of 12 Nepalese men in Iraq. Their two-part series uncovered a trail of forced labor and human trafficking that stretched from Nepal to the Middle East and was financed by U.S. defence contracts.
Washington Post reporters Joe Stephens and David B. Ottaway documented sham reconstruction projects and millions of dollars of wasted money in Afghanistan in a series that earned them the award for foreign reporting.
Other winners included:
- Radio Reporting: JoAnn Mar, an independent radio producer, for Crime Pays: A Look at Who's Getting Rich from the Prison Boom.
- Book award: Victor S. Navasky, former editor of The Nation, for A Matter of Opinion, a collection of his columns.
- Local reporting: Adam Clay Thompson, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, for a series on public housing, Forgotten City.
- Commentary: Frank Rich, New York Times, for The God Racket: from from DeMille to DeLay and Enron: Patron Saint of Bush's Fake News.
- Business reporting: Barry Meier, New York Times, for his exposé on a commonly used heart implant device with a deadly defect.
The George Polk Awards are named after a CBS correspondent who was murdered while covering the civil war in Greece in 1948. A committee of jurors, faculty members and alumni of Long Island University select the winners from entries submitted by journalists and news organizations.
