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The 2009 Polks were just announced by Long Island University, which administers them, and the award for international reporting went to Paul F. Salopek of the Tribune for “Waging War and Peace in Africa,” a series of articles last fall describing a new Pentagon initiative in East Africa. A model journalist in the George Polk tradition, Salopek won a Pulitzer in 2001 (it was his second), for coverage of civil war in Congo. In 2006 he was arrested in Sudan and accused of espionage, and he spent more than a month in jail.
Here’s a list of all of this year’s Polk winners. We particularly applaud the Polk for radio reporting, which is going to Alex Blumberg of This American Life and Adam Davidson of National Public Radio for their joint report “The Giant Pool of Money.” Says the Polk committee: “Their piece distilled down the highly complex chain of events that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. Through the stories of mortgage brokers and packagers, as well as those who have lost their homes, the pair illuminated the impact of no-interest, no-asset (NINA) mortgages and connected the dots between the people on Wall Street who made the deals and the people on Main Street whose lives will never be the same.”
