About the Livingston Awards

Mollie Parnis

The late Mollie Parnis Livingston with Neal Hochman, her nephew and successor as president of the Mollie Parnis Livingston Foundation, at the 1991 awards luncheon.

The Livingston Awards for excellence by professionals under the age of 35 are the largest all-media, general reporting prizes in American journalism. They are also unusual in judging print, broadcast and online entries against one another, a practice of increasing interest as technology blurs traditional distinctions between rival branches of the profession.

The prizes are sponsored by the Mollie Parnis Livingston Foundation, chaired by Neal Hochman, Miss Parnis' nephew and successor. She established the program in 1980 to honor her son, Robert, who published the journalism review More. Ten thousand dollar prizes for local, national, and international reporting are conferred in person by the judging panel at a New York luncheon attended by leading media figures and the winners' families and colleagues.

Mollie Parnis dress designs were wearable success symbols of the 1960's through the early 1980's. She loved and gathered around her top young talent in the fashion business, a practice she then extended to journalism. To her delight, she realized that the awards were creating a journalistic "family" of considerable and growing distinction. In most cases, it was her prizes that had recognized the winners' talent first, when they needed it most.







The Livingston Awards Group Photo

1st Row: Neal Hochman, Anna Quindlen, Lydia Polgreen, John Carroll, Mike Wallace, Kate Kelly
2nd Row: Adam Goodman, Clarence Page, John Dickerson, Dean Baquet, Ellen Goodman, Raney Aronson-Rath
3rd Row: Charles Eisendrath, Susan Goldberg, Naedine Hazell, Michele Norris, Ken Auletta

KNIGHT WALLACE FELLOWS     |     ©2008     |     THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN