Several small newsrooms on Monday took home a Pulitzer Prize — the country’s highest honor in journalism.
Though familiar names among Pulitzer winners — The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Associated Press — again earned awards this year, smaller and more modestly resourced outlets like Lookout Santa Cruz, the Invisible Institute and City Bureau joined them.
Lookout Santa Cruz won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting. Marjorie Miller — the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes — announced the newsroom’s award for “its detailed and nimble community-focused coverage, over a holiday weekend, of catastrophic flooding and mudslides that displaced thousands of California residents and destroyed more than 1,000 homes and businesses.”
Launched in November 2020, Lookout Santa Cruz, according to its about page, is the first site of Lookout Local Inc., a public benefit corporation that aims to serve communities with a new and higher standard of news, information and community engagement.
Ken Doctor, CEO and founder, said shortly after the announcement that the Lookout Santa Cruz team was in disbelief at first. They popped Champagne to celebrate.
Ken Doctor, CEO and founder of Lookout Santa Cruz, left, reacts after learning the publication won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting. (Courtesy)
“It’s an incredible day. I think we are one of the youngest, if not the youngest, news organizations to win a prize like this,” Doctor said. “And it just speaks to how that team met the moment when they needed to, in a moment of community crisis.”
In covering Santa Cruz County’s catastrophic January 2023 floods, Doctor recalled the Lookout Santa Cruz team facing shuttered roads and scattered communications.
“And we realized — just like we realized when we covered the elections in ’22 and ’24 again — that if anybody was going to respond to the community’s needs for news and information, it had to be us,” he said. “So we felt both the responsibility and, I’d say, the burden of it — of getting every piece of information we could. And really importantly in these crises, vetting it; making sure you’re getting accurate information out. When there’s flooding, there are life-and-death situations if people make the wrong mistakes. Power is out for weeks. The shelter information is fragmented.”
Doctor said he addressed his team on Monday. “I said to them, ‘You guys met the moment because we were ready,’” he said. “We hired the right people. We knew how to gather the news, vet it, distribute it at the speed of digital — including text messages if people are out of internet — and they met the moment.”
The finalists in Breaking News were the staff of the Honolulu Civil Beat for their coverage of the deadly Maui wildfires and the staff of the Los Angeles Times for their coverage of a Lunar New Year overnight shooting that left 11 senior citizens dead.
The Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting went to Sarah Conway of City Bureau and trina reynolds-tyler of the Invisible Institute, announced Miller, “for their investigative series on missing Black girls and women in Chicago that revealed how systemic racism and police department neglect contributed to the crisis.” By examining how Chicago police handle missing person cases, the two-year “Missing in Chicago” investigation revealed the disproportionate impact on Black women and girls and other issues like how officers have mistreated the family members of those missing.
Conway, a senior reporter for City Bureau, and reynolds-tyler, the data director at the Invisible Institute and a journalist, were together when they learned they won the Pulitzer Prize.
“I am humbled by the power of the families who spoke with us. I’m humbled by the immense amount of work they put into their own missing loved ones’ cases,” reynolds-tyler told Poynter. “I’m thankful for the opportunity for our reporting to go far and wide. I am from the South Side of Chicago. A lot of people that I know and love don’t really know what a Pulitzer is, and so I feel grateful for the opportunity for further impact to occur outside of the awards — the opportunity for families to be seen, for law enforcement to be seen, for conversations about solutions to be seen. That’s really how I’m feeling. I’m feeling so grateful.”
Conway said she was proud of their work, and proud of the families who took a chance on speaking with them for the investigation.
“We took a lot of pride and diligence in moving with a lot of care, in sourcing and research, and connecting with people who’ve been impacted over the past few years,” Conway said. “The recognition is something I hope lends credence to their experiences and their stories, and what they’ve gone through — who their loved ones were. Because we found, in our reporting, a lot of people had been harmed and neglected by the city and, in particular, the Chicago Police Department, at a really painful moment in their life.”
The award, Conway added, is an honor to receive with reynolds-tyler. Conway said she hopes their work brings more attention to this issue in Chicago — an issue that she noted plays out in other parts of the country, as well.
trina reynolds-tyler and Sarah Conway (Photo: Felton Kizer/Chicago Reader)
The finalists in the Local Reporting category were Jerry Mitchell, Ilyssa Daly, Brian Howey, and Nate Rosenfield of Mississippi Today and The New York Times, for their detailed examination of corruption and abuse, including the torturing of suspects, by Mississippi sheriffs and their officers over two decades, and the staff of The Villages Daily Sun for their investigation and detailed account of Florida officials’ inaction before, during and after the deadly and destructive Hurricane Ian.
The Invisible Institute also won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Audio Reporting for “a powerful series that revisits a Chicago hate crime from the 1990s, a fluid amalgam of memoir, community history and journalism.” The podcast, “You Didn’t See Nothin,” is from the Invisible Institute and USG Audio, a division of Universal Studio Group that creates fiction and nonfiction podcasts. The podcast was hosted by Yohance Lacour, a formerly incarcerated journalist and entrepreneur.
The finalists in the Audio Reporting category were Dan Slepian and Preeti Varathan, contributor, of NBC News, for their “20-year investigation that resulted in a wrongfully-convicted man finally receiving clemency,” and Lauren Chooljian, Alison Macadam, Jason Moon, Daniel Barrick and Katie Colaneri of New Hampshire Public Radio “for their gripping and extensively reported investigation of corruption and sexual abuse within the lucrative recovery industry that sought accountability despite legal pressure.”
Of the two Pulitzer Prizes won by Invisible Institute, reynolds-tyler said everyone is ecstatic. “We are just leaping for joy,” she said, pointing out that a big part of the work behind these two Pulitzer Prizes are “two Black folks who are from the South Side of Chicago who are working on stories about Black Chicagoans.”
reynolds-tyler said the opportunity for impacted populations to lead in the work of reporting on communities is a big deal.
“The team’s feeling empowered. We’re feeling excited,” she said. “We have so much more work to do together, and we’re really looking forward to running it back, doing more, caring more, telling more stories, honoring more people.”
There were some other notable finalists from smaller newsrooms. For Commentary, Brian Lyman of the Alabama Reflector was named a finalist for incisive columns that challenge a range of state policies flouting democratic norms and targeting vulnerable populations, according to the Pulitzer Prizes. Clay Bennett of the Chattanooga Times Free Press was named a finalist under Illustrated Reporting and Commentary for a portfolio of what the Pulitzer Prizes described as “deceptively gentle, mostly wordless cartoons” that communicate complex, sophisticated messages.
More from Poynter on the 2024 Pulitzer Prizes:
- Lookout Santa Cruz, digital site with a backstory, wins Pulitzer for breaking news
- The Invisible Institute won two Pulitzers this year. What is it?
- A sign of the times as Pulitzer Prizes are announced
- Pulitzers recognize coverage of Israel-Hamas war, honor journalists working in Gaza
- Reuters wins Pulitzer for Israel-Gaza photography
- A rare illustrated look into Rikers wins a Pulitzer
- Associated Press wins Pulitzer for documenting arduous migration journeys
- Here are the winners of the 2024 Pulitzer Prizes
- From the archives: Behind the Pulitzers: A look into the inner workings of journalism’s Super Bowl
- From the archives: How do you pronounce Pulitzer?
