Labor & Employment Law

Klein, Cohn, Cobble Win Major Journalism Prizes

By James Parks

Ezra Klein
Dorothy Sue Cobble
Jonathan Cohn

A newspaper reporting team for Bloomberg News, two Washington, D.C., bloggers and a labor historian are among the winners of the 2010 Sidney Hillman Foundation Journalism Awards.

The awards will be presented tonight in a ceremony at The Times Center in New York City.

The Hillman Foundation praised the late Mark Pittman, Bob Ivry, Alison Fitzgerald and Craig Torres who made up the Bloomberg News reporting as “the first to determine the true cost to the taxpayer of the federal bailout of Wall Street.” Bloomberg successfully sued the Federal Reserve to gain access to information about the  $2 trillion bailout for big banks. Pittman died in November. 

Bloggers Jonathan Cohn and Ezra Klein will be honored for their in-depth coverage over the battle for health care reform. Cohn, whose blog The Treatment  ended its run on The New Republic website in April, and Klein, who writes the Economic and Domestic Policy, and Lots of It blog for the Washington Post, provided “authoritative, up-to-the minute coverage of healthcare reform,’ the Hillman judges said.   

Dorothy Sue Cobble, professor of labor history and labor studies at Rutgers University, will receive the Sol Stetin Award for Labor History. Cobble is the author of the prize-winning books, “Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century” in 1991 and “The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America,” which won the 2005 Philip Taft Book Prize for the best book in American labor history.

Other Hillman winners are Nick Reding for his book “Methland,” Joe Amon, Hyoung Chang, Andy Cross, Judy DeHaas, Reza Marvashti, R.J. Sangosti and Craig Walker for photo, Maria Hinojosa for broadcast, Rebecca Clarren for magazine reporting, Click here to learn more about the Hillman Foundation journalism prizes.

The annual awards were first presented in 1950. Now presented in six categories, the Hillman awards are among the most prestigious given to journalists, photographers, writers and public figures whose work fosters social and economic justice. The foundation is named for Hillman, former president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and a key figure in the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which merged with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1955 to form the AFL-CIO.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on May 26, 2010 (boomark / email).