Biz journalists win Polk Awards

The winners of the 63rd annual George Polk Awards in Journalism were announced Monday by Long Island University, and at least two of the categories had business journalists as the winners.

The George Polk Award for National Reporting will go to the staff of The Wall Street Journal for a series of articles that examined and dissected new ways of insider trading involving Washington officials and well-connected investors. The Journal’s investigations, undertaken by almost a dozen reporters, showed how savvy investors gained an advantage by getting early clues to the Federal Reserve’s forthcoming policy moves.

This revelation prompted the Federal Reserve for the first time to publicly release the communications it has with banks before its monetary-policy meetings. The series also revealed how hedge fund managers get an early clue to important legislation from lawmakers in Washington, D.C., and helped trigger proposed laws to curb improper stock investing by legislators and their aides.

Three reporters at Bloomberg News will receive the George Polk Award for International Reporting for a series of articles that shed light on the practice of Western companies selling surveillance technologies to repressive regimes that use them to track, imprison and kill dissidents. The muckraking efforts of Ben Elgin, Alan Katz and Vernon Silver demonstrated — and helped halt — the complicity of Western companies in these abuses. Their stories showed how phone transcripts generated by German computers led to the arrest, interrogation and torture of Bahraini human rights activist Abdul Ghani Al Khanjar.

The series also exposed an ongoing mass-surveillance project by the Syrian government amidst the slaughter of civilians. The European Union banned the surveillance, and lives were saved as a direct result of the reporting. To get at the story, the Bloomberg News reporters spent 10 months inside the secretive world of computer programmers and former spies who sell and maintain the sophisticated surveillance tools that help totalitarian regimes quash opposition.

See all of the winners here.