Livingston Awards

Finalists

The Livingston Awards honor the best reporting and storytelling by young journalists.

The 2026 finalists below were chosen from work released in 2025.

Read the full announcement here.

Some links to the finalists’ work may require registration or a paid subscription for full access.

Excellence in Local Reporting

Curtis Brodner, Oishika Neogi and Willow Higgins
“Innocence Ignored”
New York Focus and Columbia Journalism Investigations
Rebecca Cadenhead
“No School, No Fresh Air and Isolated”
MLK50: Justice Through Journalism
Lauren Caruba and Marin Wolf
“Standard of Fear”
The Dallas Morning News
Jana Cholakovska
“Playing With Fire”
NJ Advance Media
Shirsho Dasgupta
“Dollars for Detention”
Miami Herald
Rebecca Ellis
“Exposing Misconduct in L.A. County's Historic $4 Billion Sex Abuse Settlement”
Los Angeles Times
Chris Gelardi
“The Martuscello Dynasty: Power and Patronage in New York Prisons”
New York Focus
Dana Gerber
“She Was Lonely and Depressed. Her 'Beautiful Little AI Family' Changed Everything”
The Boston Globe
Katie Hyson
“One of Their Own”
KPBS Public Media
David Leffler, Savanna Strott and Salina Arredondo
“Fumed”
Public Health Watch
Wyatt Massey and Charlotte Keith
“The Institute”
Spotlight PA
Brittny Mejia
“A Window Into the Lives of California's Most Vulnerable”
Los Angeles Times
Hallie Miller, Giacomo Bologna, Sahana Jayaraman and Krishna Sharma
“The Baltimore Housing Hustle Igniting a Foreclosure Crisis”
The Baltimore Banner
Lauren Peace
“Fault Lines: How Florida's Domestic Violence Response Fails Victims and Responders Alike”
Tampa Bay TImes
Laura Rodriguez Presa
“Lives on the Line: The Consequences of Broken Immigration Enforcement”
Chicago Tribune
Dylan Segelbaum
“District Court Commissioners”
The Baltimore Banner
Allen Siegler
“The Black Box: Inside Mississippi's Opioid Settlement”
Mississippi Today
William Skipworth
“A System of Harm”
The New Hampshire Bulletin
Jessie Smith
“Actual Innocence: A Fight for Justice, 48 Years in the Making”
The Oklahoman
Sammy Sussman
“LAX Discipline in Police Departments Across New York State”
The New York Times and New York Focus
Alexa York
“The Legacy of Luckey”
Toledo Blade

Excellence in National Reporting

Akbar Shahid Ahmed
“HuffPost State Department”
HuffPost
Ethan Bauer
“Price of Redemption”
Deseret Magazine
Emily Baumgaertner Nunn
“Can Anyone Rescue the Trafficked Girls of L.A.'s Figueroa Street?”
The New York Times Magazine
Natasha Bertrand
“Pentagon Cartel Boat Strikes”
CNN
Nicole Foy
“We Found That More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They've Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days”
ProPublica
Carlos Garcia
“The Controversy Over Tyson Foods' Hiring of Asylum Seekers”
NPR
Joshua Kaplan
“The Militia and the Mole”
ProPublica
Benjamin Katz
“Toxic Aircraft”
The Wall Street Journal
Ava Kofman
“Cage Match”
The New Yorker
Nat Lash
“What the U.S. Government Is Dismissing That Could Seed a Bird Flu Pandemic”
ProPublica
Mel Leonor Barclay and Shefali Luthra
“Mothers, Detained”
The 19th
Morgan Lieberman
“The Age of Incarceration”
Long Lead
Jason Mast
“How CRISPR Boom Went Bust”
STAT
Matt Nadel
“Cashing Out: An Investment Strategy That Profited from AIDS Deaths”
The New Yorker
Hannah Natanson
“Trump's Reshaping of the Federal Government”
The Washington Post
Aneri Pattani
“More Than 10,500 Ways State and Local Governments Spend Opioid Settlement Cash”
KFF Health News
Katie Thornton
“The Divided Dial, Season 2: On the Shortwaves”
WNYC's "On the Media" with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism
Lauren Weber and Caitlin Gilbert
“RFK Jr. and Vaccine Hesitancy in America”
The Washington Post
David Yaffe-Bellany
“The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself”
The New York Times

Excellence in International Reporting

Hanna Arhirova, Illia Novikov and Vasilisa Stepanenko
“Ukrainian Prisoners of War”
The Associated Press
Anas Baba
“The Quest for Food in Gaza”
NPR
Gregory Barber
“Inside the Controversial Tree Farms Powering Apple's Carbon Neutral Goals”
MIT Technology Review
Rachel Chason
“Crossroads of Conflict”
The Washington Post
Anna Conkling
“Returning Ukraine's Dead”
Business Insider
Nadia Hamdan
“The Gaza Flotilla Story You Didn't Hear”
Reveal
Mohammed Mhawish
“Watched, Tracked, and Targeted Life in Gaza Under Israel's All Encompassing Surveillance Regime”
New York Magazine in partnership with the Palestine Reporting Lab
Eren Orbey
“A Brother's Conviction”
The New Yorker
Casey Quackenbush
“The Ukrainian Teens Who Took on Putin's Gulag Archipelago – And Won”
POLITICO Europe
Marcelo Rochabrun
“Murder on Rainbow Mountain”
Bloomberg News
Ari Schneider
“Tombstones of Narol”
Mountain Gazette
Liam Scott
“The Campaign to Free Jimmy Lai”
The Nation
Rebecca Tan
“Chinese Organized Crime”
The Washington Post
Gerardo del Valle, Alejandro Bonilla Suárez and Edwin Corona Ramos
“Taken to CECOT”
ProPublica, The Texas Tribune, Alianza Rebelde Investiga, and Cazadores de Fake News

Knight-Wallace Fellowships

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Applications for the 2026-2027 academic year are closed.

Livingston Awards

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Entry forms to submit work published in 2025 are closed.