Nina Totenberg to be honored with the 2024 Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism
Each year, the Shorenstein Center presents the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism to recognize outstanding contributions to the field and honor work that has enriched our political discourse and our society. This year’s winner is Nina Totenberg, whose trailblazing career covering the U.S. Supreme Court has surpassed that of the longest-serving Justices in the Court’s history. Regarded as one of the “Founding Mothers” of NPR, Totenberg’s decades of award-winning reporting have cemented her status as the country’s preeminent legal reporter.
“Nina’s insightful coverage of arguably the most insular branch of government is unparalleled” said Shorenstein Center Director Nancy Gibbs. “Her expertise and thought-provoking reports are invaluable, particularly now with public trust in the nation’s highest court at near record lows.”
Totenberg will share her insights in a “fireside chat” with Gibbs at this year’s Goldsmith Awards ceremony, to be held on April 3, 2024 in the JFK Jr. Forum at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The in-person event will be livestreamed at GoldsmithAwards.org and ShorensteinCenter.org.
2024 Goldsmith Career Award winner Nina Totenberg:
Nina Totenberg is NPR’s award-winning legal affairs correspondent. Her reports air regularly on NPR’s critically acclaimed newsmagazines All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Weekend Edition. Totenberg’s coverage of the Supreme Court and legal affairs has won her widespread recognition. She is often featured in documentaries — most recently RBG — that deal with issues before the court. As Newsweek put it, “The mainstays [of NPR] are Morning Edition and All Things Considered. But the creme de la creme is Nina Totenberg.”
In 1991, her ground-breaking report about University of Oklahoma Law Professor Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment by Judge Clarence Thomas led the Senate Judiciary Committee to re-open Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings to consider Hill’s charges. NPR received the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award for its gavel-to-gavel coverage — anchored by Totenberg — of both the original hearings and the inquiry into Anita Hill’s allegations, and for Totenberg’s reports and exclusive interview with Hill.
That same coverage earned Totenberg additional awards, including the Long Island University George Polk Award for excellence in journalism; the Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for investigative reporting; the Carr Van Anda Award from the Scripps School of Journalism; and the prestigious Joan S. Barone Award for excellence in Washington-based national affairs/public policy reporting, which also acknowledged her coverage of Justice Thurgood Marshall’s retirement.
Totenberg was named Broadcaster of the Year and honored with the 1998 Sol Taishoff Award for Excellence in Broadcasting from the National Press Foundation. She is the first radio journalist to receive the award. She is also the recipient of the American Judicature Society’s first-ever award honoring a career body of work in the field of journalism and the law. In 1988, Totenberg won the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton for her coverage of Supreme Court nominations.
Totenberg has been honored seven times by the American Bar Association for continued excellence in legal reporting and has received more than two dozen honorary degrees. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Dinners with Ruth: A Memoir on the Power of Friendships.
The Goldsmith Awards, founded in 1991 and funded by a gift from the Greenfield Foundation, strives to foster a more insightful and spirited public debate about government, politics and the press, and to demonstrate the essential role of a free press in a thriving democracy.
SEMIFINALISTS FOR THE 2024 GOLDSMITH PRIZE FOR INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING
Our judging committee was tasked with reviewing over 170 entries for this year’s Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. The following semifinalists are among the top 30 entries that our judges deemed to be of extremely high quality and in keeping with the Prize’s criteria for impact on US public policy. In the coming weeks, the finalists for the Goldsmith Prize will be selected from this esteemed group, with the winner announced at the Goldsmith Awards Ceremony on April 3.
The semifinalists for the 2024 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting are listed here in alphabetical order, with links to the original reporting:
Alone and Exploited
The New York Times
Hannah Dreier
America’s Dangerous Trucks
FRONTLINE (PBS) and ProPublica
A.C. Thompson, Gabrielle Schonder, Karim Hajj, Frank Koughan, Staff of FRONTLINE (PBS), ProPublica
America, Global Gun Pusher
Bloomberg News
Michael Riley, David Kocieniewski, Eric Fan, Monte Reel, Jessica Brice, Natalie Obiko-Pearson, Michael Smith, Chris Cannon
Committed to Jail
Mississippi Today and ProPublica
Isabelle Taft, Agnel Philip, Mollie Simon
Dark Money and Special Deals
Politico
Heidi Przybyla
Deadly Dose
Tampa Bay Times
Helen Freund, Sam Ogozalek, Langston Taylor, Hannah Critchfield, Kirby Wilson
Denied by AI
STAT
Casey Ross, Bob Herman
Empty Public Housing
WBUR Radio and ProPublica
Todd Wallack, Christine Willmsen, Patrick Madden, Beth Healy
Far Right Extremists in the Texas Republican Party
The Texas Tribune
Robert Downen, Carla Astudillo
Fractured
WFAE 90.7 and FRONTLINE (PBS)
Dana Ervin, Mona Dougani, Robert Benincasa, Julia Ingram
Friends of the Court
ProPublica
Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, Brett Murphy, Alex Mierjeski, Kirsten Berg, ProPublica Staff
Ghost Tags
Streetsblog
Jesse Coburn
In Plane Sight
Atlanta News First (WANF-TV)
Brendan Keefe
Lost Rites
NBC News
Jon Schuppe, Mike Hixenbaugh, Rich Schapiro, Blayne Alexander
Maine’s Part-Time Court
The Maine Monitor
Samantha Hogan
Miami: Shakedown City
Miami Herald
Sarah Blaskey, Joey Flechas, Tess Riski, Jay Weaver, Linda Robertson, Susan Merriam
Overpayment Outrage
KFF Health News and Cox Media Group
Jodie Fleischer, David Hilzenrath, Fred Clasen-Kelly, Samantha Manning, Josh Wade, Justin Gray, Leah Dunn, John Bedell, Amy Hudak, Jesse Jones, Anna Rodzinski, Madison Carter, Shannon Butler, Ben Becker, Ted Daniel
Peddling Death
Los Angeles Times
Keri Blakinger, Connor Sheets, Brittny Mejia
Safer Sidelines
The Courier Journal and USC Annenberg’s Center for Health Journalism
Stephanie Kuzydym, Rob Byers, Kyle Slagle, Jeff Faughender
Stalled Justice
Chicago Tribune
Joe Mahr, Megan Crepeau, Brian Cassella
The 13th Step
New Hampshire Public Radio
Lauren Chooljian
The Discord Leaks
The Washington Post and FRONTLINE (PBS)
Shane Harris, Samuel Oakford, Chris Dehghanpoor, Dan Lamothe, staff of The Washington Post, Tom Jennings, Annie Wong, staff of FRONTLINE (PBS)
The Musk Industrial Complex
Reuters
The staff at Reuters
The Predators’ Playground
Business Insider
Matt Drange, Narimes Parakul, Hannah Beckler
The VA Loan Fiasco
NPR
Chris Arnold, Quil Lawrence, Robert Benincasa, Robert Little, Noah Caldwell, Graham Smith
Unfettered Power
Mississippi Today and The New York Times
Ilyssa Daly, Brian Howey, Nate Rosenfield, Jerry Mitchell, Rachel Axon, Eric Sagara, Irene Casado Sanchez, Joel Engelhardt, Kitty Bennett, Big Local News at Stanford University
Water Grab
Bloomberg Green
Peter Waldman, Sinduja Rangarajan, Mark Chediak, Kyle Kim, Jeremy C.F. Lin, Leslie Kaufman, Momar Niang, Katarina Hoije, Angus Whitley, Sybilla Gross, Elena Mejía, Raeedah Wahid, Laura Bliss
What Makes a Murderer
The New Yorker and The Yale Investigative Reporting Lab’s Felony Murder Reporting Project
Sarah Stillman
What the Hell is Going On at the FDIC?
The Wall Street Journal
Rebecca Ballhaus
With Every Breath
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and ProPublica
Michael D. Sallah, Debbie Cenziper, Michael Korsh, Evan Robinson-Johnson, Monica Sager, Margaret Fleming and the Medill Investigative Lab at Northwestern University
