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The Sidney Hillman Foundation Announces 2017 Hillman Prizes for Excellence in Journalism in Service of the Common Good


Photo credit: The Sidney Hillman Foundation

NEW YORK –(ENEWSPF)–April 25, 2017.  The Sidney Hillman Foundation announced today the winners of the 2017 Hillman Prizes, the only major all-media awards dedicated to journalism in service of social and economic justice.

This year, the Hillman Foundation honors investigative reporting about segregation in New York schools, corruption in the Chicago PD, a crisis of the 911 system, eviction as a structural cause of poverty, and Donald Trump’s campaign and charitable foundation.

“At a time when reporters are chillingly branded ‘enemies of the people’ and the very concept of truth is under siege, journalism of conscience is an absolute necessity,” said Hillman judge and longtime New Yorker staff writer Hendrik Hertzberg. “That’s what the Hillman Prizes honor and defend—the kind of journalism that explores the human realities of courage and suffering that underlie the never finished struggles for equality, social justice, and democracy.”

The 2017 Hillman judges are Ta-Nehisi Coates, national correspondent, The Atlantic; Jelani Cobb, staff writer, The New Yorker and Professor, Columbia Journalism School; Alix Freedman, Global Head, Ethics and Standards, Reuters; Hendrik Hertzberg, staff writer, The New Yorker, Harold Meyerson, executive editor, The American Prospect; and Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher, The Nation.

“This year’s Hillman Prize winners investigated powerful people and institutions and exposed hypocrisy, discrimination, and exploitation,” said Bruce Raynor, president of the Sidney Hillman Foundation, “At this moment in our history, the role of courageous journalists like our 2017 winners are more important than ever to our democracy.”

In addition to the Hillman Prizes, the foundation will present the 2017 George Barrett Award for Public Interest Law to Penda Hair, the Legal Director of Forward Justice, a nonpartisan law, policy, and strategy center dedicated to advancing racial, social and economic justice in the U.S. South. She is the lead attorney for the North Carolina NAACP in the landmark voting rights case, NC NAACP v. McCrory, in which the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals found that North Carolina’s 2013 voting restrictions were designed with “surgical precision” intentionally to suppress the vote of African Americans.

The recipients of the 2017 Hillman Prizes are:

2017 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism
Matthew Desmond
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Crown

2017 Hillman Prize for Newspaper Journalism
David Fahrenthold
For reporting on the Trump Foundation and 2016 presidential election
The Washington Post

2017 Hillman Prize for Magazine Journalism
Nikole Hannah-Jones
“Choosing a School For My Daughter in a Segregated City”
New York Times Magazine

2017 Hillman Prize for Broadcast Journalism
Brendan Keefe
“Dying For Help: Fixing The Nation’s Emergency Response System”
WXIA-TV, Atlanta

2017 Hillman Prize for Web Journalism
Jamie Kalven
“Code of Silence”
The Intercept

2017 Hillman Prize for Opinion & Analysis Journalism
Adele M. Stan
The American Prospect

The Hillman Foundation will present its distinguished annual journalism prizes, awarded every year since 1950, at a ceremony and reception at The Times Center in New York City on Tuesday May 9, 2017.

Source: http://www.hillmanfoundation.org


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