Inquirer-Daily News columnists honored for their work

Inquirer and Daily News columnist Ronnie Polaneczky has won two journalism awards for her Falling Off the Cliff series detailing the plight of adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities and the families who care for them.

Meanwhile, architecture critic and 2014 Pulitzer Prize winner Inga Saffron has been honored by the American Institute of Architects' New York chapter for her work covering preservation in Philadelphia and design in its ever-changing landscape.

The Society of Professional Journalists awarded Polaneczky its Sigma Delta Chi award for non-deadline reporting for newspapers with circulation above 100,000, for her four-part series on disabled adults and their parents, and how they deal with obtaining care and preparing for when the parents die or can no longer care for them.

Polaneczky also was named recipient of a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism by Hunter College of the City University of New York.

In announcing the Aronson Award to Polaneczky, the judges described Falling Off the Cliff as a "beautifully written and heart-wrenching series about the plight of adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families, documenting difficulties parents face in getting quality care for their offspring, from underpaid and underperforming caregivers to the enormous problems of how to plan for the death of aging parents."

The AIA New York presented Saffron with its Stephen A. Kliment Oculus Award at a luncheon April 20.

Kliment, for whom the award is named, was an architect and editor of the AIA New York's journal, Oculus, until his death in 2008. He also had been an editor of the Architectural Record. According to the New York Times, Kliment "was more interested in questions of social justice and practicality in architecture than in cutting-edge design."