The New Yorker Wins Two Polk Awards for 2025 Reporting

THE New Yorkers Editor Jon Lee Anderson and contributor Andy Kroll have been named 2025 winners of the Polk Awards, among journalism’s highest honors. Anderson received the Sydney Schanberg Award for his reporting on decades of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where regional and global actors fueled one of the world’s most violent conflicts. Kroll, journalist at ProPublicawas recognized for profiling Russell Vought, an architect of Project 2025 who used his latest role, as director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, to hobble government agencies, decimate the federal workforce and expand President Trump’s powers in ways that defy the Constitution.

Anderson, who wrote for The New Yorker since 1998, he has traveled twice to Congo and neighboring Rwanda to report his article. As many as six million soldiers and civilians have been killed during Congo’s thirty years of conflict – from violence, displacement, disease and starvation – and yet the fighting “rarely makes international headlines,” notes Anderson. The article combines deep historical context with current developments, considering the legacy of colonialism and slavery while explaining contemporary drivers of bloodshed, including ethnic rivalries, international competition for resources, and diplomatic maneuvering by the Trump administration. To give Congolese citizens a voice, Anderson spoke with figures ranging from rebel leaders to medical workers, from a regional king to an elderly woman tending subsistence crops in a cemetery. Anderson’s reporting clearly refutes Trump’s claim that he “stopped” the conflict, while also showing the risks and potential importance of an eventual resolution. “Many of the people I spoke with in Congo longed for a new way of life but seemed barely able to conceive of one,” Anderson observes.

Kroll received the Polk Prize for political reporting, for a comprehensive and often alarming portrait of Vought, one of the most important figures behind Trump’s dismantling of federal agencies and consolidation of presidential power. The profile, co-published with ProPublicatraces Vought’s improbable rise from behind-the-scenes technocrat to the highest levels of influence within Trump’s orbit. Considered by opponents and allies alike as “a master of arcane rules that can pass legislation,” Vought has used his expertise to bring about sweeping changes that eluded Trump in his first term, altering the country’s legal landscape and transforming the relationship between American citizens and their government.

The Polk Awards, which will be presented at a ceremony April 10, preserve the memory of George Polk, a CBS journalist killed in 1948 while covering the civil war in Greece. James Baldwin won the first Polk to recognize a play in The New Yorkerfor “Letter from a region in my mind”. The magazine’s writers and editors have now received a total of thirty Polk Awards. ♦