Berger News

Updates on Berger prize winners
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Abigail Tucker photo/John Smock

Abigail Tucker, the 2007 Meyer “Mike” Berger Award winner, is the first staff writer ever hired at Smithsonian magazine. Tucker left her job as a feature writer for The Baltimore Sun recently and moved to the Washington, DC-based magazine.

Carey Winfrey, the magazine’s editor and a Berger Prize winner (1978) as well, says the staff writer position grew out of a successful internship program - a little too successful, perhaps, according to Winfrey. “We would get the interns to the point of performing well and then they would leave. We needed to create a permanent position.”

The Smithsonian’s editors chose Tucker, out of a pool of 300 applicants for the position: “Abigail was in the top 1% of the candidates,” Winfrey attests. “We liked her work, then we met her, and we liked her.”

As a Mike Berger award honoree, Tucker believes this affiliation helped to give her an edge over the other applicants: “I’m sure that the recognition from Columbia University helped me get the new gig.”
Read Tucker's award winning story: A Daughter's Difficult Journey

David Gonzalez, the 1992 Berger prize winner, is one of 10 recipients of the 2008 Let's Do It Better! Diversity Award for print media for his story "House Afire," a three-part series on a Pentecostal storefront church in New York City. He received the award at aceremony held by The Let's Do It Better!, Workshops on Journalism, Race and Ethnicity over the first weekend in May. The three-day-conference, held at the journalism school, recognizes the best broadcast and print reporting on race relations and ethnic relations in the country.Gonzalez, a prolific New York Times reporter, earned another honor this spring, the 2008 Distinguished Writing Award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors, also for "House Afire".