Latest news with #GeorgePolkAwards
Yahoo
31-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Lester Holt Anchors Final Nightly News: ‘I'll Miss Our Evenings Together'
Lester Holt signed off from the NBC Nightly News on Friday. The NBC News veteran took a moment at the end of the newscast to reflect on his decade in the anchor's chair. 'After 10 years, this is my last Nightly News broadcast,' Holt said. 'As anchor, it has been an honor to lead this program.' Holt also thanked the extended Nightly News team, who joined him on-camera for his final moments as anchor. 'I'll miss our evenings together, and I'll miss the team that brings us all together,' he remarked. Holt announced his departure in February, calling his time at the Nightly News 'the honor of a lifetime.' But he's staying in the NBC News family, moving over into a full-time role at Dateline NBC, where he's been a principal anchor since 2011. He made his first public remarks about his post-Nightly News career during appearances at two awards ceremonies in April, the University of Kansas' William Allen White National Citation Award and Long Island University's George Polk Awards. 'What I know is that journalism is still a noble profession,' he remarked at the University of Kansas event. 'But one of tremendous responsibility. There is no room for arrogance if we are to succeed in our mission. There is however room for compassion.' Holt echoed the tenor of those comments in his closing Nightly News remarks, saying: 'Around here, facts matter… journalism matters, and you matter.' Tom Llamas will step into the Nightly News anchor's chair on June 2. In a sign of the times, Llamas will continue to host his streaming show, Top Story with Tom Llamas, in addition to his broadcast duties. Holt wished his successor well in his closing remarks, and a promo for the Llamas-anchored Nightly News ran during the newscast. Prior to his farewell, Holt appeared on the Today show and spoke with co-hosts Savannah Guthrie and Craig Melvin about his Nightly News tenure. 'The timing just seemed right,' he remarked. 'I never wanted to be one of those people that was totally associated with just one thing. I always think you have to have something else in your life.' Speaking of his new Dateline role, Holt said that 'long-form [journalism] is something I really wanted to get my teeth into, it's a different set of news muscles.' Holt's departure from the Nightly News leaves ABC News' World News Tonight anchor David Muir as the longest-tenured network evening news anchor. Norah O'Donnell left the CBS Evening News in January for a broader senior correspondent role at the embattled network.
Yahoo
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Lester Holt Makes 1st Public Remarks Since Announcing Departure From NBC Nightly News
Within the past week, Lester Holt delivered his first public remarks since announcing that he would be stepping down from the NBC Nightly News after a decade-long run. The outgoing anchor accepted the University of Kansas' William Allen White National Citation Award on Thursday and gave the keynote speech at the Long Island University's George Polk Awards on April 4. Both occasions saw Holt reflecting on his upcoming departure from behind the Nightly News desk, which is scheduled to take place at the beginning of the summer. He will transition to a full-time role on Dateline NBC, where he's been a principal anchor since 2011. 'I look forward to several more years as a working journalist,' Holt remarked while accepting the William Allen White honor. 'What I know is that journalism is still a noble profession,' he continued. 'But one of tremendous responsibility. There is no room for arrogance if we are to succeed in our mission. There is however room for compassion.' In his April 4 address to the audience at the George Polk Awards, Holt praised the 'talented' Dateline team that includes new addition Blayne Alexander, as well as Andrea Canning, Josh Mankiewicz, Keith Morrison, and Dennis Murphy. 'In a career spanning 45 years, I have answered the bell for the big story far more times than I will ever be able to count,' he said. 'I have traveled much of the country and much of the world. Interviewing people of great power as well as people who are powerless. The job has been an all-access pass like no other for which I am profoundly grateful.' Holt will be succeeded by Tom Llamas, who currently anchors Top Story on NBC News Now. In a sign of the times for the larger industry shift from linear to digital, Llamas will continue to host his streaming show in addition to his Nightly News duties. Holt addressed the future of journalism in his remarks at the University of Kansas, saying the profession was currently in a 'fight for its life.' 'A world without a healthy press is a world where the important questions are not asked or answered,' he noted. 'Where the powerful operate unchallenged.'
Associated Press
17-02-2025
- Politics
- Associated Press
LONG ISLAND UNIVERSITY ANNOUNCES 2024 GEORGE POLK AWARDS IN JOURNALISM
Coverage of Four Foreign Conflicts Among Winners in 15 Categories NEW YORK, Feb. 17, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Incisive reports from four areas of bloody conflict — Sudan, the Russian-Ukraine war zone, Israel's West Bank and Haiti — are among 15 winners of the George Polk Awards for 2024 announced today by Long Island University. Four other winners dealt with health and medical issues – the exploitive practices of a huge health care provider, the deadly consequences of state abortion bans, the failure of government agencies to respond to a bird flu outbreak and the unauthorized dismemberment and sale of cadavers for research and education. Also cited were reports on the dangers children face on social media platforms, Baltimore's lacklustre response to an overdose epidemic, the sale of useless and often damaging solar energy systems to vulnerable Texas homeowners, the unsavory personal history of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, secret deals allowing police in California to hide a history of corruption and criminality, a beloved novelist's ineffectual response on learning of her daughter's sexual abuse and the extended incarceration of an aged inmate for refusing to admit to a 55-ycar-old crime he swears he did not commit. The George Polk Awards were established in 1949 by Long Island University to commemorate George Polk, a CBS correspondent murdered in 1948 while covering the Greek civil war. The awards, which place a premium on investigative and enterprising reporting that gains attention and achieves results, are conferred annually to honor special achievement in journalism. The latest winners were selected from 493 submissions of work that appeared in print, online or on television or radio, nominated by news organizations and individuals or recommended by a panel of former winners. 'Given the range and depth of exceptional reporting before us,' said John Darnton, curator of the awards,"winnowing the list to these 15 meant making some very hard calls. These winners represent the best of the best. The runners-up were all worthy.' 'Long Island University has long recognized the importance of investigative journalism through the George Polk Awards and our George Polk School of Communications, which is helping prepare an international class of the journalists of tomorrow,' noted Dr. Kimberly Cline, President of Long Island University. The award for Foreign Reporting goes to Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti of The New York Times Magazine for 'The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel,' chronicling how a half-century of condoning the terrorizing of West Bank Palestinians by ultranationalist settlers and their supporters became government policy. Declan Walsh and the staff of The New York Times have won the award for War Reporting for a series of dispatches from Sudan, reported at great personal risk, demonstrating how starvation, indiscriminate destruction and inhuman atrocities were deployed as tools of a civil war. Their reporting exposed the clandestine role played in the conflict by the United Arab Emirates and other nations seeking resources and power. Confronted with Walsh's reporting, the UAE paused some of its Sudanese operation. The National Reporting award winner, Katherine Eban of Vanity Fair, revealed how political considerations that prioritized economic interests over public health concerns slowed the federal government's response to a bird flu outbreak, seemingly ignoring lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic. Alissa Zhu, Nick Thieme and Jessica Gallagher of The Baltimore Banner have won the Local Reporting award for doggedly amassing data to establish that Baltimore was enduring the most lethal drug overdose crisis of any major city in American history with some surprising victims. Their work, accomplished in the face of city officials' resistance, was supported by The New York Times Local Investigations Fellowship. Sara DiNatale of the San Antonio Express-News has been honored for State Reporting for her four-part series exposing the deceptive practices of solar energy contractors who trained door-to-door scam artists to target elderly homeowners with false promises of energy savings that never materialized, rebates that didn't exist and tax credits for which they didn't qualify. On top of worthless systems those taken in were often left with damaged roofs. The Health Care Reporting award goes to Bob Herman, Tara Bannow, Casey Ross and Lizzy Lawrence of STAT for 'Health Care's Colossus,' a penetrating six-part series examining the massive reach of UnitedHealth Group into every aspect of a broken health care system. The series focuses on how the conglomerate milks the system for profit at the expense of taxpayers, patients and clinicians by providing assembly-line care that treats millions of patients as products to be monetized. Kavitha Surana, Lizzie Presser, Cassandra Jaramillo and Stacy Kranitz of ProPublica have won the Medical Reporting award for mining hospital records and death certificates in Texas and other states that enacted stringent abortion bans in the aftermath of the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court Dobbs decision to uncover a tragic result: the preventable deaths of women denied routine treatment for pregnancy complications as new laws threatened physicians with prosecution. The award for Political Reporting goes to Jane Mayer of The New Yorker for 'Pete Hegseth's Secret History,' which unearthed a record of financial mismanagement, sexual misconduct and repeated incidents of workplace intoxication that twice cost President Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense leadership positions in advocacy groups he ran. Hegseth was confirmed by a single vote but not before an intense Senate examination of issues largely stemming from Mayer's reporting. Katey Rusch and Casey Smith, alumnae of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism Investigative Reporting Program working with the support of the program, have won the Justice Reporting award for 'Right to Remain Secret,' a two-part series published by the San Francisco Chronicle. A product of five years of research, their stories detailed how dozens of police officers in California arranged to cleanse their records of damaging behavior and retire with lucrative pensions in secret deals that allowed their departments to avoid cumbersome dismissal practice was curtailed following these revelations. The award for Technology Reporting is presented to Olivia Carville and Cecilia D'Anastasio of Bloomberg Businessweek for stories about child safety online that revealed how predators have used the Roblox gaming platform to groom and exploit children, how 'sextortion' scammers blackmailed teens via Instagram and how drug dealers sold fentanyl to kids using Snapchat. The stories had impact. Roblox rolled out new safety updates for minors, including enhanced parental controls, and Meta removed 70,000 accounts linked to financial sextortionists. Rachel Aviv of The New Yorker has been honored for Magazine Reporting for 'Alice Munro's Passive Voice,' a stunning 20,000-word opus delving into the late Canadian novelist and short story writer's dismissive reaction when she was confronted with her romantic partner's sexual abuse of her daughter, a betrayal only deepened by the revelation that Munro, a 2013 Nobel laureate, used the experience to enrich her fiction. The award for National Television Reporting goes to Mike Hixenbaugh, Jon Schuppe, Liz Kreutz and the late Susan Carroll of NBC News and Noticias Telemundo for 'Dealing the Dead,' revealing that a medical school in north Texas was dismembering the corpses of individuals who died alone. Undertaking little effort to find next of kin, it leased out the body parts for research and education, doubling the pain for relatives who discovered later that a loved one had been parcelled out an arm and leg at a time. The medical school ended the practice after reporters shared detailed findings ahead of their reports on NBC Nightly News and Special Correspondent Marcia Biggs, videographer Eric O'Connor and producer André Paultre of the PBS NewsHour have won the Foreign Television Reporting award for their series 'Haiti in Crisis,' which depicted the complete breakdown of daily life in parts of Port Au Prince with chilling interviews of citizens who have come to describe and even participate in unspeakable barbarism at the hand of street gangs in matter-of-fact terms. Biggs, a veteran reporter in global war zones, is a grand niece of George Polk. The Podcast award goes to Ben Austen and Bill Healy for the Audible Original 'The Parole Room,' which followed the 20th effort to gain parole by Johnnie Veal, convicted in the 1970 murder of two Chicago police officers and still in prison nearing 70. Negotiating an anachronistic system — Illinois abolished parole in 1978 so only those convicted before then are eligible — Veal confronted a kind of Catch-22. By steadfastly maintaining his innocence he was deemed unworthy of release for lack of remorse. The 2024 Sydney Schanberg Prize goes to Sarah of The New York Times Magazine for 'The Deserter,' a view of the invasion of Ukraine through the eyes of a disillusioned Russian combat officer who defected with his wife and child, one of 18 deserters Topol interviewed in in more than a year of reporting while keeping herself and her sources safe from Russian security services. Her detailed account of the officer's journey became an epic 35,000-word portrait of an army sent to fight a war with little meaning to them. The Schanberg Prize was established by the journalist Jane Freiman Schanberg to honor long-form investigative or enterprise journalism embodying qualities reflected in her late husband's legendary career. It comes with a $25,000 award funded by Freiman Schanberg, who stipulated that it honor 'highly distinguished, deep coverage of armed conflicts; local, state or federal government corruption; military injustice; war crimes, genocide or sedition; or authoritarian government abuses' of at least 5,000 words 'that results from staying with a story, sometimes at great risk or sacrifice.' The 2024 George Polk Award winners will be honored Friday, April 4 at a luncheon ceremony at Cipriani 42nd Street. About Long Island University (LIU) Long Island University, founded in 1926, is a leading research and teaching university that continues to redefine higher education by providing high-quality academic instruction by world-class faculty, serving more than 16,000 students from its Long Island and Brooklyn campuses. Recognized by Forbes for its emphasis on experiential learning and by the Brookings Institution for its 'value added' to student outcomes, the University is ranked in the top 7% of national research universities. LIU has a network of over 285,000 alumnus, including industry leaders and entrepreneurs around the globe. Visit for more information.
New York Times
17-02-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
The New York Times Wins 3 Polk Awards
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 University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism's investigative reporting program, Katey Rusch and Casey Smith, were awarded the justice reporting prize for the two-part series 'Right to Remain Silent,' 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 News Hour 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.
