Thirty-five recipients of the 67th Annual Peabody Awards were announced April 2 by the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. The winners, chosen by the Peabody board as the best in electronic media for 2007, were named in a ceremony in the Peabody Gallery on campus.
The awards will be presented on June 16 at a luncheon at the Waldorf=Astoria in New York City. Brian Williams, anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News, will be the master of ceremonies.
“The Peabodys were started here in 1940 as the very first award for electronic media in the world, and they’ve been presented annually since then,” said Horace Newcomb, director of the program and professor of telecommunications in the Grady College. “It is now considered the most prestigious award in electronic media.”
The winners span the breadth of today’s media, including programs like Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, NBC’s 30 Rock, the Showtime series Dexter, the Bravo reality show Project Runway and Taxi to the Dark Side, a documentary about an Afghani cabbie who died in U.S. military custody, among others.
“The awards cut across all forms. We do radio, TV shows, Web series and everything from journalism to entertainment, but the distinctive factor is we do not give our awards in specific categories. Everything competes with everything else,” Newcomb said. “We had more than 300 submissions among documentaries, and our list of winners probably has more documentaries than anything else, but we also had a high number of news items. We also give awards to small organizations like local news items. We’re very unique in that respect.”
More than 1,000 submissions were sent to the Peabody board, a 16-member panel comprised of television critics, broadcast and cable industry executives and experts in culture and the arts, that judges the entries. Selection is made by the board following review by special screening committees of UGA faculty, students and staff.
All entries become a permanent part of the Peabody Archive in the UGA Libraries. The collection is one of the nation’s oldest, largest and most respected moving-image archives.
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For more information about the Peabody Archive or the Peabody Awards, including the complete list of 2007 award winners, visit www.peabody.uga.edu.
