Livingston Awards Names Winners: 2008

New York, June 3. Charles Gibson of ABC News, Ken Auletta of The New Yorker and Anna Quindlen of Newsweek announced the winners of the $10,000 Livingston Awards for Young Journalists in local, national and international reporting. The prizes are limited to journalists under the age of 35 and are the largest all-media, general-reporting prizes in the country.

In addition to the prizes for young journalists, the Livingston Awards also honors a senior professional who has been a superb on-the-job mentor with a $5,000 prize named for Richard M. Clurman, the distinguished Time, Inc. journalist. Dean Baquet of The New York Times made the presentation to John S. Carroll, newspaper editor emeritus.

Winners for 2008 work are:

  • Local reporting. John S. Dickerson, 26, of the Phoenix New Times, for “The Doctor is Out,” a three-part series on medical standards and regulation in Arizona that disclosed the failure of the state and medical institutions to keep unqualified, drug addicted or criminally negligent physicians from practicing medicine.
  • National reporting. Kate Kelly, 34, of The Wall Street Journal, for “Lost Opportunities Haunt Final Days of Bear Stearns,” her three-part series about the collapse of the Bear Stearns company. Her early coverage of the event depicted the beleaguered firm’s executives as they attempted to forestall the company’s failure but then yielded to a government-sponsored forced sale to J. P. Morgan Chase & Co.
  • International reporting. Lydia Polgreen, 34, of The New York Times. With her three-part series, “The Spoils,” Polgreen focused on tin and uranium to explain an ironic tragedy in which exploitation of Africa’s natural resources wealth often bring violence and poverty.
  • Carroll won the Richard M. Clurman Award for mentoring young journalists throughout a 40-year career that included being the top editor of the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun and the Lexington Herald-Leader. During his five years at the LA Times, he led that paper to 13 Pulitzer Prizes, five of them awarded in 2004. He became a reporter for the Providence Journal-Bulletin, then the Baltimore Sun, when he reported from Vietnam, the Middle East and Washington D.C. Later he served as metropolitan editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He has served on the Pulitzer Prize board and in 2002 was its chairman. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Gibson, Auletta, Quindlen and Baquet are joined on the Livingston judging panel by Christiane Amanpour, chief international correspondent for of CNN; Tom Brokaw, special correspondent at NBC News; Ellen Goodman, columnist with The Boston Globe and Clarence Page, columnist with the Chicago Tribune. The program is directed by University of Michigan professor Charles R. Eisendrath, a former correspondent for Time magazine in Washington D.C., London, Paris and Buenos Aires.

CONTACT: Candice Liepa, 734-998-7575

KNIGHT WALLACE FELLOWS     |     ©2008     |     THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN