The 2026 George Polk Awards
- Isabela Rangel
- Apr 20
- 3 min read
Updated: May 6
BY: ISABELA RANGEL / MANAGING EDITOR
MANHATTAN, NY—Last Friday, April 10th marked the 77th annual George Polk Awards luncheon and ceremony at Cipriani’s. The event, organized by Long Island University, hosted a lively group of winners, reporters, and students to celebrate the year’s highlights across all forms of reporting.
Established in 1949, the prestigious event was created to honor distinguished journalists and to memorialize CBS correspondent George Polk, who died in Greece while covering the Civil War.
This year’s theme revolved around journalists who have done influential reporting in showing “The Human Face of The Immigration Crackdown.” Their work showcased sociopolitical issues surrounding war zones, federal policies, and immigration, honoring both the journalists in the room as well as foreign correspondents still actively reporting from around the world.
The event began with a reception at Cipriani’s, where the room buzzed with journalists, young and old, trading experiences and words of wisdom. The centerpieces at each table displayed several names to honor reporters who had lost their lives this year from the conflicts they were investigating.
After a few words from this year’s commencement speaker, American journalist Lesley Stahl, 15 awards were presented to several reporting teams, each with its own unique stories to tell in national, environmental, and foreign reporting, to name a few.
Among the ceremony’s honorees were The Boston Globe reporters Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio and Mark Arsenault, who won the award in Local Reporting for their coverage of Rümeysa Öztürk’s arrest.
Öztürk is a Turkish graduate student who was taken from her campus by masked ICE agents and held in Louisiana for six weeks while the government debated her citizenship status.
Nick Miroff, a staff writer for The Atlantic, also had a hand in publicizing immigration cases and was recognized for covering the wrongful deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Miroff won the Polk Award for Immigration Reporting.
Environmental Reporting, another pivotal category in the mix of this year’s theme, went to a reporting team from Business Insider for their work on “The True Cost of Data Centers.” Their reporting uncovered the effects that high-maintenance data centers for Artificial Intelligence have on surrounding communities and environments.
The ceremony also took time out to honorably mention a few younger journalists receiving awards, making this the first year in which the Polk Awards have included a category for high school students. Eli Gologanova and Esther Gould were co-winners of the Feature Writing award for “The Eternal Life of Jeff Buckley,” published in The Echo at The High School for Math, Science, and Engineering.
In paying homage to the theme of the day’s ceremony, the Polk Awards also featured the Investigative Reporting Award, which was presented to both Lathania Williams and Angeline Collado. Williams, a student at Bronx River High School, published “ICE Crackdown Threatens Students, Neighborhoods,” with her school’s newspaper. Collado, Editor-In-Chief for the Curtis Log (Curtis High School), was recognized for her piece, “Lost SNAP Benefits Impact Curtis Community.”
The final award, the George Polk Career Award, highlights one journalist’s journey through their life in reporting. This year’s award went to Maria Hinojosa, a Mexican-American news anchor, executive producer of Latino USA, and CEO of Futuro Media Group.
“The world of journalism is not easy,” Hinojosa said in an interview with Seawanahaka. “You go into this because you have this passion for the truth, and for justice and democracy and for telling important stories that aren’t usually told.”
As this year’s ceremony came to a close, the final closing remarks gave young journalists the large but hopeful task of keeping reporting alive and accessible to the public. The message hung in the air as a wake-up call rather than a conclusion—a reminder that the work that was recognized today was only the beginning.