NYU’s Carter Journalism Institute Releases Nominees for “Top 10 Works of Journalism of the Decade”

Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, Anne Applebaum’s “A Warning From Europe: The Worst Is Yet to Come” in the Atlantic, John Oliver’s HBO program “Last Week Tonight,” and Lourdes Garcia-Navarro’s coverage of the Arab Spring protests for NPR are among the more than 120 nominees for the “Top 10 Works of Journalism of the Decade in the United States.” 

Established by New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, the honor will recognize nonfiction work on current events that appeared from January 1, 2010 to December 31, 2019. 

“Most journalism awards focus on a single year and a single medium,” notes Mitchell Stephens, a professor at the Carter Journalism Institute who oversaw the nomination process. “The competition will be much stiffer here—since we are looking back over a decade and considering all forms of journalism. The 10 that are selected from this impressive and varied list of nominees will be works of tremendous impact and lasting value.” 

The winners, selected by a panel of distinguished judges, along with NYU’s journalism faculty, will be announced on October 14 during an online ceremony featuring those who are being honored and many of the judges. Please visit the event page to register. 

“In making these nominations, our judges and the faculty were able to look back with the perspective of time and consider work, unlike in most of the yearly awards, that appeared in a variety of media—in newspapers, magazines, or on the air; in blogs, books, or documentaries; in one piece, a series, or in an extended body of work,” adds Stephens.

The nominees are listed on the Carter Journalism Institute web site. They were proposed by a panel of judges that included Pulitzer Prize winners Leon Dash and David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, as well as author Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, former PBS and NPR correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault, former “CBS Evening News” anchor Dan Rather, faculty at NYU’s Carter Journalism Institute, and selected Institute students and alumni. 

“This has been in many ways a difficult decade for journalism in the United States, but it has produced some extraordinarily good, enlightening, and, in retrospect, crucial work,” Stephens observes. “That is the journalism we want to recognize and, thereby, encourage. The last decade was an important and turbulent time in America, which demanded, and in many cases inspired, first-rate journalism.” 

Other nominees include: Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations” in the Atlantic; David Barboza’s “Billions in Hidden Riches for Family of Chinese Leader” in the New York Times; Michael Lewis’ The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine; “Harper High School” on “This American Life”; Laura Poitras’ “Citizenfour”; and “On the Border” by “60 Minutes.” 

Other judges were Pulitzer Prize winners Madeleine Blais, a professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Wesley Lowery, a reporter at the Washington Post, and Dorothy Rabinowitz, a member of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, as well as author and cultural critic Greil Marcus, the Verge Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel, New York magazine’s Frank Rich, the New Republic’s Walter Shapiro, Sree Sreenivasan, a professor at Stony Brook University’s School of Journalism, New Yorker staff writer Sarah Stillman, and Ben Yagoda, a professor at the University of Delaware. 

In 2000, NYU’s journalism program selected the “Top 100 Works of Journalism of the 20th Century.” Heading that list were John Hersey’s Hiroshima, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate investigations. In 2010, it chose the “Top 10 Works of Journalism of the Decade,” covering the first 10 years of the 21^st century.

For more on the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, please visit https://journalism.nyu.edu/. 

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