Paul Tobenkin Memorial Award Past Winners
Past Winners
Tina Griego, a reporter at The Denver Post, is the winner of the 2011 Paul Tobenkin Memorial Award for her three-part series, "Raising Sun Valley," a story of a poor, isolated neighborhood whose hard-working residents are nearly invisible to Denver's citizens.
Over the years, Griego has shone a light on Sun Valley's mixed-racial community. As she writes, "Something occurs in a place where so much poverty has been concentrated. Particularly in a place that has been cut off from other working – or middle class families and where millions of dollars have been spent to help people survive, but scant attention has been given to an environment that will allow them to thrive."
Members of the Journalism School's faculty honored Griego for "her insightful and illuminating reporting in her 2010 series of articles about Sun Valley. It is a downtown Denver neighborhood where 1 out of every 10 of the 1,300 people who call it home live in subsidized housing. It is isolated and hidden among industrial neighbors – walled off by a river and below a freeway."
The Denver Post columnist has a lengthy journalism career starting as a reporter at The Los Angeles Times in 1989. She continued to work as a reporter at The Albuquerque Tribune and the Denver Rocky Mountain News before becoming a columnist at The Denver Post in 2001. Griego shortly returned briefly to the News working for 7 years until it closed in February, 2009. The Denver Post brought her back as a columnist shortly thereafter.
She is a member of the Scripps Howard Hall of Fame for commentary and a recipient of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists Print Journalist of the Year Award among other professional honors.
Nina Bernstein of The New York Times has won the Paul Tobenkin Memorial Award for courageous reporting, stemming from her 2009 series of articles that documented the mistreatment of immigrants in federal custody.
Read the "In-Custody Deaths" series
Bernstein was recognized for her strong story telling abilities and narrative voice in the uncovering of unreported deaths that federal detention center officials tried to hide from the public. Her reporting also won the prestigious Freedom Forum/ASNE Award for Distinguished Writing on Diversity.
Read Bernstein's acceptance speech:
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"This is a richly deserved and long overdue recognition of Ms. Bernstein’s dedication to giving a voice to the voiceless immigrants who often undergo harsh treatment and are the subject of hate crimes from the intolerant members of our society," said Arlene Morgan, the associate dean of prizes and programs, which administers the Tobenkin Award.
Morgan also said that Bernstein’s work carries on the tradition of solid and tenacious beat reporting that is incumbent with ferreting out instances of racial, ethnic and religious discrimination. "Bernstein’s work should be an inspiration to our students who must understand that one of their social obligations as reporters is to write authentically about people who can not speak out themselves because of the fear and discrimination that pervades their search for the American dream."
Bernstein, who specializes in the coverage of immigration, has covered a broad range of social and legal issues for The Times, both as a metro reporter and as a national correspondent. Soon after joining the paper in 1995, she led an investigation into the death of Elisa Izquierdo, a child who was in the care of the city’s child welfare agency when she was beaten to death. The resulting articles by Bernstein and three colleagues won the 1995 George Polk Award for distinguished metropolitan coverage.
Bernstein previously worked for Newsday for nine years, where she served as a foreign correspondent in Berlin and Bosnia and on national and metropolitan assignments concerning health care, legal affairs, education and child welfare. Before that, she worked for newspapers in Milwaukee and Iowa. She is the author of "The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care," which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Bernstein won a PEN literary award and received the 2002 New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. Her first book of fiction, "Magic by the Book," a fantasy novel for children 10 and up, was published in 2005 and has since appeared in Spanish, German and Turkish translations.
The Chauncey Bailey Project, which received the Tobenkin Award in 2009, was conceived to probe the assassination of an Oakland journalist who was investigating a business called Your Black Muslim Bakery. The project’s work, which appeared in The Oakland Tribune and on the Web sites of the Center for Investigative Journalism, The Maynard Institute for Journalism Education and the New America Media Association, is the result of a unique collaboration of a number of journalists and Bay Area news organizations.
Past awards highlighted the work of The Denver Post, The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Reporter for racial and ethnic reporting that exposed uncovered discrimination and challenged the status quo. The Let's Do It Better! Workshop on Journalism, Race and Ethnicity also incorporated the Tobenkin Award in its list of workshop honorees.
Lawless Lands: Michael Riley, a reporter for The Denver Post, was awarded the 2008 Tobenkin Award for "Lawless Lands," a series that investigated how a dysfunctional federal justice system allowed serious American Indian reservation crimes, such as murder and rape, go unpunished.
Chicago Matters: The Chicago Reporter and its editor and publisher, Alysia Tate, received the 2006 Tobenkin Award for its project, "Chicago Matters," a public information multimedia series initiated and funded by the Chicago Community Trust. In 2005, the Tobenkin Award honored the work of Steve Hymon, Mitchell Landsberg, Charles Ornstein, Tracy Weber and Robert Gauthier of The Los Angeles Times for their Pulitzer Prize-winning five-part series documenting the mismanagement and malpractice at the Martin Luther King, Jr./Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles, which opened after the 1965 Watts riots to address the lack of medical facilities in the community. Tshortcomings and the political conditions that thwarted effective reform. Follow-up articles, editorials by Mary Engel and commentary by columnist Steve Lopez were also recognized.
Contact Information
Arlene Morgan, Associate Dean
Columbia University Journalism School
2950 Broadway
New York, NY 10027
212-854-5377
am494@columbia.edu
Lisa S. Redd, Associate Director
Laura G. Tejeda, Administrative Assistant
Columbia University Journalism School
2950 Broadway
New York, NY 10027
212-854-7696
lt2026@columbia.edu