The Sidney Hillman Foundation announced last week the winners of the 2016 Hillman Prizes, the only major all-media awards dedicated to journalism in service of social justice.
This year, the Hillman Foundation honors investigative reporting about American families living on two dollars a day, the Flint water crisis, brutality and impunity among guards in New York prisons, and the human cost of a militarized U.S/Mexico border, as well as an agenda-setting commentator on women in politics and a broadcaster who has brought intelligent conversation to the airwaves.
“Our goal at Hillman is to encourage the kind of journalism that goes beyond abstractions like racial equality, women’s rights, equality of opportunity, and equal justice under law to show the human realities of courage and suffering that underlie the unfinished struggle to achieve them,” said Hillman judge and New Yorker staff writer, Hendrik Hertzberg. “This year’s winners do that, and so do a great many of the entries from which they were chosen.”
The 2016 Hillman judges are Jelani Cobb, staff writer, The New Yorker and Associate Professor of History, UConn; Alix Freedman, Global Head, Ethics and Standards, Reuters; Hendrik Hertzberg, staff writer, The New Yorker, Harold Meyerson, editor-at-large, The American Prospect; and Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher, The Nation.
“Given current debates about civil rights, income inequality, and the right of workers to organize unions, this year’s Hillman Prize winners covered topics essential to the ongoing battle to make this country better for everyone,” said Bruce Raynor, President of the Sidney Hillman Foundation.
In addition to the Hillman Prizes, the foundation will present the 2016 Sol Stetin Award for Labor History to Alice Kessler-Harris, the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of History at Columbia University.
The winners of the 2016 Hillman Prizes are:
2016 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism
$2 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America
Kathryn J. Edin & H. Luke Shaefer
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2016 Hillman Prize for Newspaper Journalism
Michael Winerip, Michael Schwirtz, Tom Robbins
“Cellblock Justice”
New York Times
2016 Hillman Prize for Broadcast Journalism
Melissa Harris-Perry
MSNBC
2016 Hillman Prize for Magazine Journalism
Melissa del Bosque
“Death on Sevenmile Road”
Texas Observer/The Investigative Fund
2016 Hillman Prize for Web Journalism
Curt Guyette
The Flint Water Crisis
ACLU of Michigan Democracy Watch Blog
2016 Hillman Prize for Opinion & Analysis Journalism
Rebecca Traister
Writer-at-large, New York magazine; contributing editor, Elle
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 3, 2016. Reporters are invited to cover the gala, please contact Loretta Kane (loretta@caminopr.org or 202-657-4159) to RSVP. Advance notice is required to attend.
