2021 FRONT PAGE AWARD WINNERS
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE January 11, 2022
Press Contact: Jennifer H. Cunningham
president@newswomensclubnewyork.com
Undeterred by Year Two of the Global Coronavirus Pandemic, The Newswomen’s Club of New York Announces 2021 Front Page Award Winners
The Front Page Awards, presented since 1937 by the Newswomen’s Club of New York, recognizes journalistic excellence among women.
The year 2020, with the first worldwide pandemic in a century, a contentious presidential election and an overdue racial reckoning, tested us as never before. Then along came 2021.
The coronavirus pandemic dragged on in seemingly unending waves that re-crested even as they ebbed, yanking rediscovered physical “normalcy” out from under us as we strove to reconnect beyond Zoomlandia. Vaccines arrived, and with them a tsunami of conspiracy theories, adding to those already swirling around Biden’s presidential win and fueling an insurrection. The racial reckoning continued, with a dollop of justice but more deaths. And the coronavirus toll climbed.
Through it all, our winning women intrepidly reported, whether they were toiling in the streets, mining emotionally charged territory to get at underlying truths, or shining a light into the cracks in society unmasked, as it were, by the pandemic and the responses to it.
The 84th annual Front Page Awards pay tribute to exceptional newswomen at more than two dozen local, regional and national outlets across the New York metropolitan area.
The 2021 Front Page Awards will be presented virtually and streamed online next month. You can follow the Awards through the Newswomen’s Club of New York on Twitter, @NYNewswomen , and Instagram, @nynewswomenclub.
The Front Page Award for Journalist of the Year goes to Sharon Lerner of The Intercept, who exposed Big Pharma’s profiteering on the coronavirus pandemic and scrutinized the ways in which chemical companies have done end runs around EPA limits to harmful chemicals over the decades, to the detriment of public health.
The Marie Colvin Award for Foreign Correspondence goes to Sarah Topol, who kept our eyes on events outside U.S. borders, and on issues beyond the coronavirus that merited attention. As a writer at large for The New York Times Magazine, she has reported from dozens of countries on four continents. Her reports on a young Uighur woman’s attempts to wrest her parents from Chinese detention, Taiwanese youth’s trepidation after watching what China did to democracy protests in Hong Kong, and the trauma experienced by the Rohingya people in Myanmar were deep, insightful and wrenching.
The Ida B. Wells Award Honoring Exceptional Coverage of Communities of Color will go to Josefa Velasquez and Claudia Irizarry Aponte, who reported on food delivery workers’ conditions and attempts to organize during the pandemic. Velasquez is the state Capitol reporter for The City and has also worked at The Associated Press, Politico New York and the New York Law Journal covering the governor and Legislature. Aponte is The City’s Bronx reporter.
The Martha Coman Front Page Award for Best New Journalist will go to Lauren Gurley at VICE, for her reports for Motherboard on Amazon drivers’ endless quest to pee, as well as the retail giant’s anti-union push, and the brutal megacycle shifts some employees are forced to work. Gurley has also been a contributing writer for Rural America In These Times.
The Nellie Bly Award for Best Bylined Front Page Story goes to Amanda Glodowski of Crain’s New York Business, for “Car City,” an in-depth analysis of skyrocketing car ownership on New York City streets.
The Lifetime Achievement Award goes to Gail Collins, who has highlighted pioneering women throughout her tenure at The New York Times, and indeed was one herself as the first woman to serve as editorial page editor for the newspaper.
During a career starting in the early 1970s, Collins founded the Connecticut State News Bureau, which covered state politics and the capitol, and ran it from 1972 through 1977. It was sold in 1977 it was the largest news service of its kind in the country, counting more than 30 weekly and daily newspapers as clients. Through the 1980s and 1990s she was a columnist at The New York Daily News and then at Newsday, then worked as a financial reporter at United Press International in New York.
In addition to regular op-ed pieces for the Times, Collins has written six books, most of them centered on women and history, with a seventh on the way. There is her profile of women who were sidelined from the U.S. civil rights movement, even though many were integral to moving it forward; her insights into what has —and hasn’t — transpired in the century since women were granted the vote, and her look at Hillary Clinton’s presidential loss and the intact glass ceiling.
FULL LIST OF FRONT PAGE AWARD WINNERS
AUDIO
Feature: Shelly Banjo, Bloomberg, “Foundering: The Tik Tok Story”
Investigative Reporting: Jennifer Strong, Hilke Schellmann, Emma Cillekens, Karen Hao, MIT Technology Review, “In Machines We Trust”
DOCUMENTARY
Short Form Documentary: Sara Joe Wolansky, The New Yorker, “An N.Y.C. Subway Operator’s Nightmare: Hitting a Person”
LOCAL REPORTING
Breaking News: Josefa Velasquez, The City, “Cuomo Resigns After Harassment Findings Obliterate Support, Leaving Legacy of Ambition and Aggression”
Feature: Corina Knoll, The New York Times, “What Happened When Henry Yao Almost Went Bust”
Investigative Reporting: Eileen Grench, The City, “Juvenile Justice in New York City”
MAGAZINES
Essay: Madeleine Schwartz, The New York Review, “Criminalizing a Constitutional Right”
Feature: Lisa Miller, New York Magazine, “Children of Quarantine What does a year of isolation and anxiety do to a developing brain?”
Interview: Irin Carmon, New York Magazine, “The Tiger Mom and the Hornet’s Nest”
Investigative Reporting: Katherine Eban, Vanity Fair, “The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins”
“Biden’s COVID-19 Origins Report Leaves the Lab Leak on the Table”
“In Major Shift, NIH Admits Funding Risky Virus Research in Wuhan”
NEWSPAPERS
Beat Reporting: Dana Mattioli, The Wall Street Journal, “How Amazon Wins”
Feature: Katherine Rosman, The New York Times, "This Is Rachel Uchitel, Representing Herself"
Investigative Reporting: Melissa Korn and Andrea Fuller, The Wall Street Journal, “‘Financially Hobbled for Life’: The Elite Master’s Degrees That Don’t Pay Off”
The Nellie Bly Award for Best Bylined Front Page Story: Amanda Glodowski, Crain’s New York Business, “Car City”
ONLINE
Blogs: Caroline Fairchild, Editor At Large, “Working Together”
Breaking News: Taylor Ardrey, Insider “'They've killed us for less!': Black activists slam the disparity between responses to BLM demonstrators and pro-Trump rioters who breached US Capitol”
FEATURE: Tariro Mzezewa, Hannah Price, Veronica Chambers, Dodai Stewart, Marcelle Hopkins, Jennifer Harlan, Amanda Webster, Sukanya Aneja, Mint Boonyapanachoti, The New York Times, “Hear a Harlem Choir Rejoice Again”
Digital Video: Kristen Burns, Danielle Franco, Rachael Knudsen, Summer Doan, Susi Sharma, Charlotte Frasier, Teresa Carante, VICE, “Bad Goods' Forbidden Scales”
Investigative Reporting: Claire Brown, Jessica Fu, The Counter, “‘Someone’s profiting off this’: New public records reveal Covid-19 hunger relief contractors get handsome payouts for mediocre food boxes”
“‘Please take a moment to thank Jehovah’: Churches distributing USDA food boxes are blurring the boundaries between church and state”
“Food box contractor sent itself $3 million worth of milk intended for Covid relief, House Democrat alleges”
“An Oklahoma man made people attend a “ghost story” (read: sermon) before getting USDA food boxes. Then he let them take up to 30 at a time.”
Multimedia News Package: Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, Anjali Singhvi, The New York Times, “What the Tulsa Race Massacre Destroyed”
Social Media Video: Anneke Ball, Hanna Jiang, Cate Brown, Elizabeth McCauley, Julia Press, Emily Harger, Liz Kraker, Hannah Jiang, Laura Brickman, Havovi Cooper, Barbara Corbellini Duarte, Erica Berenstein, Kate Macchi, Insider, “The symbols worn by Capitol insurrectionists, decoded”
PHOTOGRAPHY
Breaking News: Stephanie Keith, Reuters, “Supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump climb on the outside of the U.S. Capitol building during a "Stop the Steal" protest in Washington D.C. U.S. January 6, 2021.”
Feature: Jody Rogac, “Dr. Anthony Fauci: Guardian of the Year”
Photo Editing: Nakyung Han and Jolie Ruben, The New York Times, “Keeping Love Close”
Photo Essay: Desiree Rios, The New York Times, “‘It’s Not Enough:’ Living Through A Pandemic On $100 a Week”
SPECIALIZED REPORTING
Arts: Cheyenne Roundtree, The Daily Beast, “Are You the One?’ Contestant Gianna Hammer Claims Production ‘Drugged’ Her and Covered Up Sexual Assault”
“When Marilyn Manson Put a Gun to Her Head Her She Thought, ‘Am I Going to Die?’”
Business: Julia-Ambra Verlaine, Gunjan Banerji, Juliet Chung, Caitlin McCabe, Rachel Louise Ensign, The Wall Street Journal, “Keith Gill Drove the GameStop Reddit Mania. He Talked to the Journal.”
“GameStop Mania Reveals Power Shift on Wall Street—and the Pros Are Reeling”
“Robinhood, Three Friends and the Fortune That Got Away”
Editorial Opinion/Criticism: Maya Phillips, The New York Times, “My Screens Are Filled With Black Death, but I Won’t Look Away,” “August Wilson, American Bard,” “In ‘What to Send Up,’ I See You, Black American Theater”
Education: Meredith Kolodner, The Hechinger Report, “Public Colleges Shock Students by Sending Them to Costly Debt Collecting”
Environment: Somini Sengupta, The New York Times,“‘No One Is Safe’: Extreme Weather Batters the Wealthy World”
“It’s Some of America’s Richest Farmland. But What Is It Without Water?”
“Biden Wants to Be the Climate President. He’ll Need Some Help From Xi Jinping”
Medicine/Health/Fitness: Josefa Velasquez, The City, “Outsiders Get Vaccinated at Washington Heights Armory Cuomo Touted as Combating COVID ‘Inequity’”
“Washington Heights Vaccines Now for Local Residents Only, Hospital Says in Switch After THE CITY Exposed Inequities”
Personal Service: Anne Tergesen, Bourree Lam, Veronica Dagher, Amber Burton,
Laura Saunders, The Wall Street Journal, “Tiny Changes Can Help You Achieve Savings Goals for Retirement”
Politics: Ann Choi, Christine Chung, Samantha Maldonado, The City, “How Garcia, Wiley and Morales Gave Their Male Mayoral Rivals a Run for Their Money”
“Women Take the Lead in City Council Fundraising Race After Years of Gender Imbalance”
“Small Donors Shine in Record-Breaking NYC Mayoral Election Year”
Science/Technology: Jessica Seigel, Knowable Magazine, “The truth about lying: You can’t spot a liar just by looking — but psychologists are zeroing in on methods that might actually work”
Sports: Kovie Biakolo, Time Magazine, “25 Years Ago, Nigeria’s Super Eagles Won Olympic Gold—and Changed the World of African Soccer”
TELEVISION
Breaking News: Janice Johnston, Cat McKenzie, Jasmine Brown, Melia Patria, Muriel Pearson, Karin Weinberg, Eman Varoqua, Jennifer Joseph, Sally Hawkins, Juju Chang, Eva Pilgrim, Gail Deutsch, Stephanie Fuerte, Amanda Karrh, Deborah Kim, Sandy Lee, Stephanie Lorenzo, Marjorie McAfee, Christina Ng, Cho Park, Annie Pong, Tenzin Shakya, Jeca Taudte, Knez Walker, Meredith Frost, Mollie Riegger, Tenzin Shakya, Paulina Tam, Rachel Wenzlaff, Joohee Cho, Kate Hakyung Lee, Gina M. Pampinella, Janine Feczko, Tami Sheheri, Emilia Baldwin, Caitlyn Goodhue, Lexi Leib, Maytal Mizrahi, Acacia Nunes, Arielle Schwartz, Priya Shah, Lauren DiMundo, Natalie Cardenas, Catherine Lang, Jocelyn Rogalo, Esther Castillejo, Olivia Osteen, Alyssa Gregory, ABC NEWS 20/20, “Murder in Atlanta”
Feature: Emily Green, Jika Gonzalez, VICE NEWS TONIGHT, “Deported to Death”
Interview: Robin Roberts, Katie Conway, Danielle Genet, Mya Green, Nicole Curtis,
Eboni Griffin, Karen Leo, Karin Weinberg, Meagan Redman, Claire Pedersen, Ashley Riegle, Siobhan O’Driscoll, ABC NEWS, “A Mother Speaks: Judge Esther Salas”
Special Programming (Public Affairs or Editorial): Jenn Suozzo, Michelle Melnick, Stephanie Gosk, Brenda Breslauer, Shannon Weston, Kristen Powers, Laura Strickler, NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, “Vaccinating America/Distribution Challenges,” “West Virginia’s COVID Vaccine Rollout Strategy,” “NBC News Exclusive: Lab Pfizer Vaccine Originated From”
Special Reporting (INVESTIGATIVE OR ENTERPRISE): Marjorie McAfee, Jessica Hopper, Cho Park, Briana Stewart, Arielle Schwartz, Tenzin Shakya, Katie Muldowney, Ashley Riegle, Knez Walker, Lori Riendeau, Candace Smith Chekwa, Eman Varoqua, NIGHTLINE, “What America Owes”
WIRES
Beat Reporting: Jennifer Surane, Reporter, Bloomberg, “Wall Street's Delayed (Again) Return to Office”
Feature: Patricia Hurtado, Bloomberg, “Giuliani FBI Search Turns Table on 1980s Wall Street Top Cop”
Investigative Reporting: Laura Sanicola, Reuters, “Lime Tree Bay Investigation”
ABOUT THE NEWSWOMEN’S CLUB OF NEW YORK
The Newswomen's Club of New York, established in 1922, is the only professional organization in the New York metropolitan area dedicated to supporting newswomen. The Front Page Awards, established in 1937, exemplifies the Club’s mission to promote exceptional work by women in the news business and support the highest standards of journalism.