Sidney Awards
For more than fifty years, the Sidney Hillman Foundation has awarded the Hillman prizes, which are among the most prestigious honors in journalism. This year, the foundation inaugurated the Sidney, a monthly award for an outstanding piece of socially-conscious journalism. We are looking for investigative work that fosters social and economic justice. Make a nomination.
July, 2010
Edward Luce
The Financial Times
Edward Luce has won the July Sidney award for “The Crisis of Middle Class America,” published in The Financial Times. Luce’s piece is a stunning
portrait of the “slow economic strangulation” of millions of middle class Americans. He writes that this decline started long before the great recession, “which merely exacerbated the ‘personal recession’ that ordinary Americans had been suffering for years.”
Edward Luce, receiving his Sidney (Photo: Michelle Frankfurter)
June, 2010
Mac McClelland
MotherJones.com
Mac McClelland has won the June Sidney award for “Depression, Abuse, Suicide: Fishermen's Wives Face Post-Spill Trauma,” published on MotherJones.com. McClleland’s piece details the way the oil spill in the gulf has affected individual households, from a shortage of food for fishermen’s families to disputes with BP over the size of relief checks – as well as a surge in reports of domestic violence, up in some places by 320%.
May, 2010
Michael Powell
The New York Times
Michael Powell has won the May Sidney award for the May 30, 2010 New York Times story “Blacks in Memphis Lose Decades of Economic Gains,” a striking portrait of the recession’s devastating effects on the black community of Memphis. The city’s woes are a microcosm of the ills affecting African-Americans across the country.
Photo Credit: Dave Sanders
Michael Powell Accepts Sidney Award in NYT Newsroom
April, 2010
Doug Struck
The Christian Science Monitor
Doug Struck has won the April Sidney award for a six-part series in The Christian Science Monitor exposing the fraud surrounding the growing market for carbon offsets. Struck reveals that because of exaggerated claims, poorly run projects, and deceptive practices, carbon offsets have a negligible role in the fight against global warming.
March, 2010
Alex Halperin
American Prospect
Alex Halperin has won the March Sidney award for “Drill, Maybe Drill?”, his feature in The American Prospect which examines whether the plans for extensive natural-gas drilling in upstate New York are a “ticket out of economic depression – or a serious environmental risk.”
February, 2010
David Barstow
The New York Times
David Barstow has won the February Sidney Award for "Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right," his searing portrait of the Tea Party Movement in The New York Times. The story details how the pressures from a severe recession have melded with propaganda repeated by Glenn Beck and other right-wing broadcasters to produce broad fears of an imagined plan by the federal government to seize guns and suspend basic liberties.
Photo Credit: Dave Sanders
David Barstow Accepts the Sidney at the NYT Newsroom
January, 2010
Anderson Cooper
CNN
Anderson Cooper has won the January Sidney Award for his network's unrivaled coverage of the devastation following the recent earthquake in Haiti. Together with his producer, Charlie Moore, and his cameraman, Neil Hallsworth, Cooper did a splendid job of chronicling the painful details of daily life in the aftermath of the quake.
Photo Credit: Julie Gottesman
Anderson Cooper and team accept the Sidney award in CNN's studio.
December, 2009
Tony Judt
The New York Review of Books
Tony Judt has won the December Sidney Award for What Is Living and What Is Dead In Social Democracy, his extraordinary piece in the December 17th issue of The New York Review of Books. Judt's essay, based on lectures delivered at New York University last October, chronicles the role of social democracy in 20th century political thought.
November, 2009
Dave Jamieson
Washington Post Magazine
Dave Jamieson has won the November Sidney Award for his Washington Post Magazine article “The Treatment of Kenny Farnsworth,” a compelling account of a homeless man in Washington, D.C. who, like millions of Americans, depends exclusively on hospital emergency rooms for medical care.
October, 2009
Katy Bolger
Pavement Pieces
The October Sidney Award was awarded to Katy Bolger for her piece about the environmental catastrophes produced by coal and uranium mining on a Navajo reservation in Northeast Arizona. Bolger's piece is part of the series, "The Forgotten Navajo: People In Need," which was published in the Pavement Pieces website of New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.
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Certificate designed by Edward Sorel
The Sidney is awarded monthly to a piece published in an American magazine, newspaper, on a news site, or a blog. Television and radio broadcasts by an American news outlet are also eligible, as are published photography series.
Deadlines are the last day of each month. The piece must have been published in the month preceding the deadline. In the case of magazines, please nominate according to the issue date on the publication, not when it first appeared.
Nominations are accepted for one's own work, or for someone else's.
The Foundation will announce a winner on the 15th of each month. Recipients will be awarded $500, a bottle of union-made wine, and a certificate designed especially for the Sidney by New Yorker cartoonist, Edward Sorel.
If you wish to nominate yourself or a piece by anyone else, please click here for our nomination form.If you have any further questions about the nomination process, please send your inquiry to ckaiser@hillmanfoundation.org