The George Polk Awards in Journalism are a series of American journalism awards presented annually by Long Island University in New York in the United States.

The awards were established in 1948 in memory of George Polk, a CBS correspondent who was killed covering the Greek Civil War. In 2009, John Darnton was named curator of the George Polk Awards.

See List of George Polk Award winners for the recipients of the award.

Josh Marshall's blog, Talking Points Memo, was the first blog to receive the Polk Award in 2008 for their reporting on the US Attorney Scandal.

In addition, the George Polk Career Award is given in recognition of an individual's lifelong achievements.

George Polk (17 October 1913, Fort Worth, Texas - May 1948) was an American journalist for CBS who disappeared in Greece and was found dead a few days later on Sunday May 16, 1948, shot at point-blank range in the back of the head, and with hands and feet tied. Polk was covering the civil war in Greece between the right wing government and communists and had been critical of both sides. He alleged that a few officials in the Greek government had embezzled up to $250,000 in foreign aid (equivalent to $2.3 million in 2011 dollars) from the Truman Administration, a charge that was never proved.

He had been particularly outspoken in his criticism of the Truman government's unqualified support for the rightist authoritarian regime in Greece. In the late 1970s, the story emerged as to how AMAG (American Mission for Aid to Greece) authorities helped the Greek police frame two young communists for his death.^{[citation needed]}

Wilbert Rideau (born February 13, 1942) is a former death row inmate in Louisiana, as well as an author and award-winning prison journalist. Rideau was initially convicted of murder and served time in the Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola). He was released in 2005 after being retried and convicted of the lesser charge of manslaughter.

A Life magazine article in March 1993 referred to Rideau as "the most rehabilitated prisoner in America." While in prison, Rideau edited a prison magazine called The Angolite. He has also written several books and compilations.

Rideau was incarcerated in Louisiana State Penitentiary (better known as Angola Prison) from 1961 to 2000, convicted in three successive trials by all-white, all-male juries of murdering bank teller Julia Ferguson in the aftermath of a bank robbery. A fourth trial in 2005, before a mixed-race jury of ten women and two men, resulted in a conviction of manslaughter, for which he was sentenced to 21 years. Since he had already served nearly 44 years for the bank robbery and killing, he was freed immediately.

Seymour (Sy) Myron Hersh (born April 8, 1937) is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author based in Washington, D.C. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security matters. He has also won two National Magazine Awards and is a "five-time Polk winner and recipient of the 2004 George Orwell Award."

He first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. His 2004 reports on the US military's mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison gained much attention.

Anthony Shadid (September 26, 1968 – February 16, 2012) was a foreign correspondent for The New York Times based in Baghdad and Beirut. He won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting twice, in 2004 and 2010.

From 2003 to 2009 Shadid was a staff writer for The Washington Post where he was an Islamic affairs correspondent based in the Middle East. Before The Washington Post, Shadid worked as Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press based in Cairo and as news editor of the AP bureau in Los Angeles. He spent two years covering diplomacy and the State Department for The Boston Globe before joining the Post's foreign desk.

In 2002, he was shot in the shoulder by what he believed to be an Israel sniper in Ramallah while reporting for the Boston Globe in the West Bank.

On March 16, 2011, Shadid and three colleagues were reported missing in Eastern Libya, having gone there to report on the uprising against the dictatorship of Col. Muammar Al-Ghaddafi. On March 18, 2011, The New York Times reported that Libya agreed to free him and three colleagues: Stephen Farrell, Lynsey Addario and Tyler Hicks. The Libyan government released the four journalists on March 21, 2011.