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The Graduate School of Journalism has announced the winners of the 2006 Mike Berger Award for local reporting. Andrea Gurwitt, JN'00, a feature writer for the Herald News in West Paterson, N.J., and Katie Thomas, a reporter at Newsday in Long Island, N.Y., will share the Berger award and each receive $500. A special citation this year went to Stephen Wick, a reporter at Newsday.
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| Andrea Gurwitt is a feature writer for the Herald News. |
Writing forcefully on the topics of immigration, domestic violence and migrant labor, this year's Berger prize winners share the spirit of the late New York Times reporter, Meyer "Mike" Berger, who inaugurated the "About New York" column for the Times and received the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting at the newspaper.
The awards will be presented on May 16 by Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism, at the school's "Journalism Day," which is part of the school's commencement ceremony.
The panel of three professors from the Graduate School of Journalism who judged the awards commended Andrea Gurwitt for "chronicl[ing] the lives of seemingly ordinary people in a way that is altogether fresh, engaging and compelling. Her stories are reported and told with depth and sophistication and do honor to the Berger legacy." Gurwitt switched careers from documentary video editing to print journalism after graduating from Columbia Journalism School in 2000. At the Herald News, a 32,000 circulation-daily, Gurwitt covers work and labor issues and is a member of its editorial board.
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| Katie Thomas is a Newsday reporter. |
The judges cited the work of Katie Thomas, "who spent several months following the lives of two very different women, one middle class, the other poor, who had a sad fact in common: they were both abused wives." By watching close up how they managed to leave their abusive husbands, and then struggled to stay away from them, Thomas managed to bring this all too common problem to light, and to break many stereotyped assumptions about battered women. The result is "a moving and very real portrait of two women, with the kind of heart, detail and lack of sentimentality" which is a mark of Berger's best work.
Thomas started work at Newsday in 1998 and continues to work as a general assignment reporter. A reporter for two prize-winning investigative series, Thomas has covered several major events, including the most recent Hurricane Katrina aftermath in New Orleans.
Steve Wick has received a special citation from the judges for his "stories about the last potato grader on Long Island and the mostly invisible black men and women who worked there. These stories are hauntingly rich with detail and historical context. They are at once an update on what became of some of the black Southerners who came north in search of opportunities and a triumph about the resiliency of human beings."
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| Stephen Wick, a reporter at Newsday, received a special citation. |
Wick joined Newsday in 1978 as a beat reporter for Suffolk County. He was promoted to the position of East End Bureau Chief in 1984 and shared in a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting in 1997. Last year, Wick was appointed deputy editor for Long Island.
The Berger Award, created in 1960, honors in-depth local reporting on the lives of everyday people. Louis Schweitzer, a New York industrialist and an admirer of Berger's writing, started the award in 1960. Last year's winner was Dan Barry, who writes the "About New York" column for The New York Times.
This year, the geographic eligibility for submissions for the Mike Berger Award was extended beyond the New York metropolitan area to include reporters working for newspapers along the eastern seaboard from New Hampshire to Washington, D.C. As a consequence of the expansion, the judges were pleased with the considerable number of editors who gave their reporters ample time to report and ample space to publish enterprising and meaningful work.
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