Update (October 25, 2016, 5:15 P.M.): The Dennis & Victoria Ross Foundation on Thursday named Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron winner of the 2016 Hitchens Prize. In honoring Baron, the foundation cited the premium he has put on reporting while stewarding several major American newspapers, and those papers’ readiness to tackle difficult, controversial, and local stories under his guidance. Baron will receive the award at a dinner in New York later this fall.

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Last November, the Dennis & Victoria Ross Foundation awarded the first Hitchens Prize, created to honor the legacy of the late Vanity Fair correspondent Christopher Hitchens, to the documentarian Alex Gibney, known for documentaries such as Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and *Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief *.

Dennis Ross, a Boston-based attorney, and his wife, Victoria, started the nonprofit foundation in 2014 in order to promote emerging artists and to encourage public debate surrounding current and relevant subjects. It should come as no surprise, then, that the foundation honors the legacy of the ever-combative, passionately truth-seeking Christopher Hitchens, who died in 2011 at age 62. The Hitchens Prize is awarded annually and includes a cash reward of $50,000, to “an author or journalist whose work reflects a commitment to free expression and inquiry,‭ ‬a range and depth of intellect,‭ ‬and a willingness to pursue the truth without regard to personal or professional consequence.”

Nominations for the second annual Hitchens Prize are now open, through September 30.

“As with last year’s winner, Alex Gibney, we seek to recognize individual, distinctive, and provocative voices, that speak to issues of the day with passion, insight and unvarying honesty, all following in the spirit of the Prize’s namesake,” said Dennis Ross, the foundation’s president. Ross, along with Vanity Fair editor, Graydon Carter, and author Christopher Buckley, will form the prize’s selection committee.

Nominations should include the nominee’s name, a brief statement of their qualifications, and citations of their illustrative published work. They can be submitted to hitchensprize@dvrf.org.

The prize will be awarded at a ceremony in New York City, at a date to be determined following the close of nominations and a decision by the selection committee. In attendance at last year’s ceremony, held at the Waverly Inn in Manhattan, were Hitchens’s wife, Carol Blue Hitchens, Ross, Carter, and Buckley, and novelist Martin Amis, Hitchens’s closest friend, who awarded the inaugural prize to Gibney. One of the documentary filmmaker’s earliest films, The Trials of Henry Kissinger, was based on Hitchens’s book about the former Secretary of State, and the two had worked closely together. “I was most impressed by Christopher’s writing about his own death, and the disease that ultimately took his life,” Gibney said upon accepting. “In a late interview he did with 60 Minutes, Steve Kroft seemed to be begging him to invest in the possibility of an afterlife. And [Hitchens] said, ‘Well, there’s no evidence I could think of that would ever lead me to that possibility . . . but I like surprises.’”