Anne Hull, a five-time Pulitzer Prize finalist who won the award in 2008 for coverage of the poor care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, is leaving The Washington Post.
She is traveling to Berlin with her partner, a German journalist.
Hull, who serves on Poynter’s board of trustees, is departing The Post “reluctantly” after spending 17 years at the paper, according to a farewell memo sent to the newsroom by National Editor Scott Wilson.
Her work, which examined “how people in this uneven country live, struggle, achieve, explain their world” will leave a legacy at the newspaper among her readers and colleagues, Wilson wrote.
Her work with Dana Priest and Michel duCille in 2007, after they spent months inside the gates of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, chronicling the appalling conditions that awaited many of the war wounded, won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. For its intimacy and impact, the work will forever remain on a short list of the most important journalism The Post has ever published.
Before joining The Washington Post, Hull was a reporter for the Tampa Bay Times (née St. Petersburg Times) where she worked for more than a decade. During her tenure at the St. Petersburg Times, Hull was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for stories that profiled guest workers at a crab processing plant in North Carolina and laid bare a local businessman’s hidden penchant for drugs and prostitutes.
Here’s Wilson’s entire note:
I am sad to announce that Anne Hull, whose words and storytelling produced some of the most important, intimate and memorable journalism in The Post’s long history, will be leaving at the end of the year. Anne will be moving to Berlin with her partner, a German journalist.
Anne says she is leaving reluctantly and that it is time to wander and explore after 17 extraordinary years at The Post. I would need more than two hands to count the number of times I have been asked, after disclosing I work at The Post, whether I know Anne Hull. Most of those asking did not know her themselves, only the byline and the bracing prose beneath it. Hers is a legacy that will last – among readers, among many of us who have admired her skill and grace, among those who model their work on hers.
She arrived at The Post in the summer of 2000 as an enterprise reporter, hired by then managing editor Steve Coll. Her focus according to the org chart was social policy: immigration, race, class, dislocation and what she calls “the outliers,” which came to mean the working-class men and women enlisting to serve in our post-9/11 wars, second-generation immigrants, gay teenagers in George W. Bush’s very conservative America. She also covered Hurricane Katrina, the actual events of 9/11 and other milestone breaking news stories.
But Anne’s focus, in fact, was on how people in this uneven country live, struggle, achieve, explain their world and suffer for their beliefs, how some people find communities and others land in isolation, the fair and the unfair in a nation that pretends often that there is no real distinction between the two. Her work with Dana Priest and Michel duCille in 2007, after they spent months inside the gates of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, chronicling the appalling conditions that awaited many of the war wounded, won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. For its intimacy and impact, the work will forever remain on a short list of the most important journalism The Post has ever published.
Before Walter Reed, Anne was a five-time finalist for the prize.
Anne devoted herself to The Post and The Post has benefited in countless ways. She says she came to the place “because of the un-formulaic journalism it produced, and the ideals of the Graham family.” “You choose the people you want to work with, not the place you think might be most beneficial,” she says. “This theory has paid off. There’s no better place to work in 2016 America than The Washington Post.”
Please join us in saying goodbye to Anne at 3 p.m. on December 16.
Scott
