Three journalists from The Baltimore Banner have won the organization’s first George Polk Award, which recognizes investigative reporting that achieves results.

Alissa Zhu, Jessica Gallagher and Nick Thieme spent about two years investigating Baltimore’s overdose crisis in partnership with The New York Times Local Investigations Fellowship.

They won the Local Reporting Polk Award, one of the most prestigious honors in journalism, for “doggedly amassing data to establish that Baltimore was enduring the most lethal drug overdose crisis of any major city in American history with some surprising victims,” according to the Polk Awards announcement.

The Banner sued the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in December 2022 after the agency refused to fill a public records request to turn over complete autopsy reports. In January 2024, a judge sided with The Banner and ordered the state to turn over the records, which became the basis for the overdose series.

The Banner found that the city’s overdose crisis was triggered by fentanyl and exacerbated by the exploitative practices of government-funded addiction treatment providers, a single generation of older Black men’s struggle with drugs and the failure of city leaders to forcefully respond.

”We embarked on this reporting because we were struck by the number of people dying — more than 6,000 deaths in six years — and how little it was being talked about,” said Kimi Yoshino, The Banner’s editor in chief. “I’m proud that the stories by Alissa Zhu, Jessica Gallagher and Nick Thieme are having an impact and that city leaders have again made fighting the opioid epidemic a priority.”

The group’s reporting has led to quick changes. Three days after a troubled treatment program was profiled, state regulators moved to shut it down. It’s since stopped providing treatment, and the housing it runs has been investigated by the city.

Within hours of The Banner publishing a story on the drug overdose death rate in the city, two council leaders brought the topic up in budget hearings. Since then, council members have called for hearings and introduced bills on overdoses, and demonstrators have rallied outside City Hall, one holding a sign referencing “6,000 in six years” — the number of deaths the reporters had revealed.

The Banner is working to make the autopsy data it obtained available to academics who reached out to the newsroom. The Banner, in collaboration with The New York Times Local Investigations Fellowship and Stanford University’s Big Local News, also shared its data analysis with nine other news organizations to help kickstart a national conversation about the toll of the opioid epidemic on an overlooked generation of older Black men.

The George Polk Awards were established in 1949 in honor of George Polk, a CBS correspondent who was murdered in 1948 while covering the Greek Civil War. The award, which honors investigative and enterprising reporting that “gains attention and achieves results,” also recognizes “the intrepid, bold and influential work of the reporters themselves.”

This year’s winners were selected from nearly 500 submissions.

“Given the range and depth of exceptional reporting before us,” said John Darnton, curator of the awards,“ winnowing the list to these 15 meant making some very hard calls. These winners represent the best of the best.”

The New York Times won three awards, including for war reporting, foreign reporting and the 2024 Sydney Schanberg Prize for “The Deserter,” a series in The New York Times Magazine about a Russian combat officer who defected. The San Antonio Express-News was honored for its state reporting on the deceptive practices of solar energy contractors, and Vanity Fair won for national reporting on the federal government’s response to a bird flu epidemic. A full list of winners is here.