The New York Times Wins 3 Polk Awards

The New York Times on Monday won three George Polk awards, including two for its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. The prizes were among the five that honored journalism on that conflict and the war in Ukraine.

Long Island University, the home of the journalism awards, announced the winners in 13 categories, which were selected from 497 submissions of work done in 2023.

“As horrific as the outbreak of war in the Middle East and the ongoing fighting in Ukraine were, they provided us with no shortage of magnificent reporting, done at great peril, from which to choose,” John Darnton, the longtime Polk Awards curator, said in a statement.

This year is the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Polk Awards, which will be celebrated with an event in April inviting all past recipients. Sixteen will be honored as George Polk career laureates, including Dean Baquet, a former New York Times executive editor; Nikole Hannah-Jones, a staff writer at The Times Magazine; the CNN chief international correspondent, Christiane Amanpour; and the former Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron. The awards are named for the CBS journalist George Polk, who was killed in 1948 while covering the Greek civil war.

The staff of The New York Times was awarded the foreign reporting prize for its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, which included extensive reporting on Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7 and Israel’s aggressive military response in Gaza. Times reporters showed that Israel had known of Hamas’s plan of attack for more than a year but ignored warnings and was ill-prepared.

Samar Abu Elouf and Yousef Masoud of The Times won the award for photojournalism for their photographs of the conflict from inside Gaza, capturing the horrific toll of Israel’s airstrikes on civilians, including the death and injury of many children.