Long Island University | The Guardian
Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Ewen MacAskill and Barton Gellman won the 2013 George Polk Award for National Security Reporting. The award, announced on Sunday, is shared between The Guardian, where Greenwald and Poitras formerly worked and MacAskill still works, and Gellman and The Washington Post “for investigative stories based on top-secret documents disclosed by former intelligence analyst Edward Snowden.”
The reporters conferred with Snowden to negotiate release of the material and then used their extensive backgrounds covering national security to explore the purloined files and reveal their stunning import on the Website Guardian US, describing how the NSA gathered information on untold millions of unsuspecting — and unsuspected — Americans, plugged into the communications links of major Internet companies and coerced companies like Yahoo and Google into turning over data about their customers.
Martin Pengelly of The Guardian reported on the award Sunday.
John Darnton, curator of the awards, said: “In the tradition of George Polk, many of the journalists we have recognised did more than report news. They heightened public awareness with perceptive detection and dogged pursuit of stories that otherwise would not have seen the light of day.
“Repercussions of the NSA stories in particular will be with us for years to come.”
Shawn Boburg of The (Bergen County, N.J.) Record also won in the State Reporting category for stories uncovering the Gov. Chris Christie/George Washington Bridge scandal. Poynter wrote in January about Boburg’s reporting.
Andrea Elliott of The New York Times won for Local Reporting for her “Invisible Child” series. The Post’s Rosalind Helderman, Laura Vozzella and Carol Leonnig won the Political Reporting for their work on Former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, and Meg Kissinger of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel won the Medical Reporting award for the “Chronic Crisis” series, which looks at Milwaukee’s mental health system.
Find the full list of winners here.
