Businessweek, STAT News wins Polk Awards

The George Polk Award for technology reporting has been awarded to Olivia Carville and Cecilia D’Anastasio of Bloomberg Businessweek for stories about child safety online that revealed how predators have used the Roblox gaming platform to groom and exploit children, how “sextortion” scammers blackmailed teens via Instagram and how drug dealers sold fentanyl to kids using Snapchat.

The stories had impact. Roblox rolled out new safety updates for minors, including enhanced parental controls, and Meta removed 70,000 accounts linked to financial sextortionists.

The health care reporting award goes to Bob Herman, Tara Bannow, Casey Ross and Lizzy Lawrence of STAT for “Health Care’s Colossus,” a penetrating six-part series examining the massive reach of UnitedHealth  Group into every aspect of a broken health care system.

The series focuses on how the conglomerate milks the system for profit at the expense of taxpayers, patients and clinicians by providing assembly-line care that treats millions of patients as products to be monetized.

The George Polk Awards were established in 1949 by Long Island University to commemorate George Polk, a CBS correspondent murdered in 1948 while covering the Greek civil war. The awards, which place a premium on investigative and enterprising reporting that gains attention and achieves results, are conferred annually to honor special achievement in journalism.

The latest winners were selected from 493 submissions of work that appeared in print, online or on television or radio, nominated by news organizations and individuals or recommended by a panel of former winners.

See all of the winners here.