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George Polk Awards

George Polk Awards
The George Polk Awards are conferred annually to honor special achievement in journalism. They were established by Long Island University in 1949 to commemorate Polk, a CBS correspondent murdered the year before while covering the Greek civil war. Winners are chosen from newspapers, magazines, television, radio and online news organizations. Judges place a premium on investigative and enterprise work that is original, requires digging and resourcefulness, and brings results. Some of the most respected names in journalism have won Polk Awards, including Edward R. Murrow, Christiane Amanpour, Carl Bernstein, David Halberstam, Gay Talese, Fred Friendly, I.F. Stone, Morley Safer, Joseph Lelyveld, Anthony Lukas and Walter Cronkite. The awards are presented each spring at a luncheon in Manhattan and are preceded the night before by the Polk Seminar, which features a panel of winners discussing topics in journalism.

Winners of 2012 George Polk Awards

Long Island University has announced the winners of the 2012 George Polk Awards in Journalism, including David Corn of Mother Jones who broke the story about presidential candidate Mitt Romney's videotaped "47 percent" remarks and reporters from Bloomberg News and The New York Times who uncovered high-level corruption in China.

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Polk Grants for Investigative Reporting

The George Polk Award program provides grants for experienced reporters to undertake investigative projects on themes of social justice. The aim is to shine a light on problems in health, welfare, immigration, discrimination, economic inequality and related areas and to publish the articles on the Web and in print.

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