The University Record, June 25, 1996
Three journalists receive Livingston awards; Peters wins new Clurman Award
A blue-ribbon panel of print and broadcast journalists has awarded $10,000 Livingston Awards to three young journalists for excellence in local, national and international reporting, and has created a fourth prize honoring the late Richard M. Clurman, one of the program’s founders.
Sponsored by the Mollie Parnis Livingston Foundation and administered by the University, the awards are the largest all-media, general reporting prizes in the country and are the only major contest in which entries from different media directly compete.
Winners, all of whom must be under age 35, are:
Local reporting: Chris Adams, 30, reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, for “Medicaid Madness,” a three-part computer-assisted investigative series about massive, politically linked fraud in Louisiana’s medical system.
National reporting: Jim Lynch, 34, reporter for the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., for “Angry Patriots,” a three-part portrait of militant separatist groups in a region of the inland Northwest known locally as “The Ragged Edge.”
International reporting: David Rohde, 28, foreign correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, for six articles documenting the slaughter of Muslim prisoners by Bosnian Serbs in the largest massacres in Europe since the Holocaust.
In addition, the new $5,000 Richard M. Clurman Award was presented to Charles Peters, founding editor of Washington Monthly, for “nurturing, critiquing and inspiring young journalists.” The prize will be given annually to a working professional who, like Clurman as chief of correspondents for the Time-Life News Service in the 1960s, took time to “mentor the next generation,” according to Charles Eisendrath, director of the Livingstons.
“The Clurman Award represents the other half of outstanding work by the young,” Eisendrath says. “Behind each of them is an older somebody who has shown them the right ropes and occasionally pulled some strings.”
