Newswise — New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute has named Lauren Sandler, a former editor at Salon and producer at NPR, and Lindsey Konkel, an independent journalist who has written for National Geographic and Science, as recipients of its 2015 Reporting Award.
The award supports a work of journalism in any medium on significant underreported subjects in the public interest.
Sandler will focus on the life of a homeless woman at a private Brooklyn shelter, which takes women in during their last trimester of pregnancy and gives them a base for one year—through birth and their child’s first nine months.
Konkel will investigate the health consequences of racial and ethnic inequalities in biomedical research. Previous research has shown that people most affected by disease are often those least studied. The discrepancy is vital because, for many diseases, the effectiveness of treatments has been shown to vary by race and ethnicity, yet most studies on the genetics of disease have been conducted on people of European descent.
Stephen D. Solomon, associate director of the Institute, notes that the need for the award remains as strong today as it was in 2009, when it was established to encourage enterprise journalism during a time of extensive budget and personnel cuts throughout the journalism industry.
“Both stories will explore important issues that could affect public policy decisions in the future,” said Solomon. “They very ably carry out the mission of the Reporting Award.”
Sandler, who has reported from Baghdad to Beijing, has authored One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child, and the Joy of Being One (2013) and Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement (2006). Her work has appeared in Time, the New York Times, Slate, the Atlantic, the Nation, and the New Republic, among other publications. Konkel focuses on health and environmental issues. Her 2012 story, “Stress + Pollution = Health Risks for Low-Income Kids,” was part of the Environmental Health News series on “Pollution, Poverty, People of Color,” which received Honorable Mention in the Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism.
Sandler and Konkel will each receive stipends of $2,500 upon their selection as competition winners and an additional $6,500 upon successful completion of the work. As visiting scholars at NYU, they both will have use of the Institute’s facilities as well as NYU’s libraries and other scholarly resources. The completed articles are expected to be published in a major media outlet either alone or in conjunction with the Institute.
Sarah Stillman, the inaugural recipient of the Reporting Award, traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan to report on the abuse of third-world service workers on U.S. military bases there. Her piece, “The Invisible Army,” which appeared in the June 6, 2011, issue of the New Yorker, won several of journalism’s top prizes in 2012: the National Magazine Award in the category of “Public Interest”; the Hillman Prize for Magazine Journalism; the Overseas Press Club’s Joe and Laurie Dine Award for International Human Rights Reporting; and the Michael Kelly Award for the “fearless pursuit and expression of truth.”
For more on the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, go to http://journalism.nyu.edu/; for more on the Reporting Award, go to: http://journalism.nyu.edu/thereportingaward/.
Applications for next year’s award will be accepted in the middle of January 2016.
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