Reporter Jill Leovy Wins 2016 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism

MAY 19, 2016 – Journalist Jill Leovy has won The New York Public Library’s 2016 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism for her groundbreaking work, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America.

Leovy, a Los Angeles Times crime reporter and founder of the newspaper’s acclaimed blog “The Homicide Report,” won the prestigious award on May 18 at a ceremony at the Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. Her book – a New York Times best-seller published by Spiegel & Grau – evaluates and brings new insights to the country’s murder epidemic and the long-standing plague of black homicide. Focusing on the murder of one young black man in South Los Angeles and the team of detectives investigating the crime, Ghettoside addresses broad issues of history, race, violence and justice.

The book stems from Leovy’s work with the “Homicide Report,” which aimed in 2007 to chronicle every murder that took place in Los Angeles. Leovy covered 845 murders that year, and was embedded with storied LA Police Department divisions, such as the Watts homicide squad.

“I'm honored to receive an award associated with such a great institution, and humbled to be in the company of such exceptional finalists,” said Leovy, who lives in Los Angeles and could not attend the ceremony. “Thank you for recognizing me and Ghettoside, and most of all for creating this award in the first place -- it's remarkable that there are people who understand this kind of journalism, and choose to support it. Thank you.”  

Ghettoside – was one of five finalists for the Bernstein Award selected by an eight-member Library Review Committee, which received and read over 85 nominations from publishers. The winner was chosen by a separate Bernstein Selection Committee, chaired by accomplished journalist James Hoge. The finalists were:

• Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel by Dan Ephron (W. W. Norton & Company)
• One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Asne Seierstad (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• The Prize: Who’s In Charge of America’s Schools by Dale Russakoff (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• Strangers Drowning by Larissa MacFarquhar (Penguin Press)

The award ceremony’s keynote speaker was acclaimed New York Times journalist Kim Barker, whose book Taliban Shuffle was turned into a movie starring Tina Fey earlier this year.

“You know how important investigative journalism is,” she said to the crowd. “You know how rare it is, to work at a place where you get the support to do real investigative journalism. You know how difficult it is, to keep digging into a topic, when you’re not sure what’s at the end of the dig or even if it’s worth a story. You know how lonely it is, how isolating it is, how difficult you are to be around when you are in the beginning, middle, or end of stories. You’re basically just difficult. You know how you dream a story and get to the end of a story and flip out because an editor decided that he wanted to eliminate a comma, because that is how close we are to stories, and how at that point, when a story is so perfect, you would rather kill said editor than succumb to the elimination of a comma. You know what it’s like to dig down an empty well, and how impossible it is to climb out of it. You know what it’s like to live inside a story. You know who you are, because you are in this room.”

Barker went on to discuss the “decimation” of the journalism industry, and how it is so important for reporters like the ones honored by the Bernstein Awards to keep doing their work. NYPL President Tony Marx agreed that investigative journalism continues to be extremely important, adding, “A Democratic society without great writers, without great journalists, without great books or great libraries is simply a world I would not want my children to live in.”

The Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism was established in 1987 through a gift from Joseph F. Bernstein, in honor of journalist Helen Bernstein Fealy. The award, which comes with a $15,000 prize, honors  working journalists whose books have brought clarity and public attention to important issues, events or policies.

Media Contact:

Angela Montefinise | angelamontefinise@nypl.org

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