By: E&P Staff Dan Barry, columnist for The New York Times, has won the 2005 Mike Berger Award from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, it was announced today.
The award is named for the late New York Times reporter Meyer "Mike" Berger who, as Barry does now, wrote the "About New York" column for the Times in the 1950s. Past winners include Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin.
Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia j-school, will present Barry with the Berger Award along with a $1,000 honorarium on May 17 during the Journalism Day celebration at the school. Michael Kinsley, an editor at the Los Angeles Times, is scheduled to join Barry and deliver the Journalism Day's annual Pringle Lecture.
Dan Barry has been writing the "About New York" column for The New York Times since June 2003. The judges, from the school's journalism faculty, said, "Barry finds poetry in the story of a baby pitched from a burning building into the arms of a Wall Street janitor. He re-sculpts the shards of a gritty poet's life who is holed up as the last tenant in a Bowery flophouse. The ordinary is elevated to extraordinary, and the artistry of newspaper writing is raised to a new standard."
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