Back-to-back for ProPublica
For the second year in a row, ProPublica won what is generally considered the top award for both the Pulitzers and all of journalism — the prize for Public Service. This year’s award went to Kavitha Surana, Lizzie Presser, Cassandra Jaramillo and Stacy Kranitz for their heartbreaking portrayal of pregnant women who died after doctors delayed the urgent care they needed for fear of violating strict abortion laws.
A year ago, ProPublica won for its groundbreaking report on how politically influential billionaires tried to woo Supreme Court justices with gifts and trips.
This is just the second time — and first since The Washington Post in 1999-2000 — that a news organization has won consecutive Public Service Pulitzers.
This year’s winner, “Life of the Mother,” was, at times, a difficult read because of the deeply personal and tragic stories, but it showed the importance of ProPublica and the very definition of “public service.”
For more on ProPublica’s second win in a row, check out my Poynter colleague Amaris Castillo with “ProPublica is a back-to-back Public Service Pulitzer winner.”
Almost forgotten, but recognized
President Donald Trump has been in office for just more than 100 days — 100 chaotic, unsettling, absurd, relentless days.
That followed a dizzying final two months of 2024 after Trump was elected. That followed a historic election in which Trump was elected for the second time after defeating the first African American and first Asian American woman — who ran because the then-president dropped out of the race.
So much happened over the past 100 days and the past three months and the past six months that you almost forget: Trump was nearly killed by an assassin’s bullet last summer in Western Pennsylvania.
But on Monday, we were reminded when the Pulitzer Prizes recognized the work of that July 13 moment by several news outlets.
The staff of The Washington Post won a Pulitzer for Breaking News for what the Pulitzer Board said included “detailed story-telling and sharp analysis that coupled traditional police reporting with audio and visual forensics.”
Meanwhile, The Associated Press was named a finalist in Breaking News for its coverage of the Trump assassination attempt.
Doug Mills of The New York Times won for Breaking News Photography, including for one photo that amazingly showed a bullet whizzing through the air as Trump spoke.
A Banner year
The Baltimore Banner is in just its third year of existence, but won a well-deserved Pulitzer in local reporting for its incredibly in-depth reporting of Baltimore’s fentanyl crisis and its disproportionate impact on older Black men. The award was given to the Banner’s Alissa Zhu, Nick Thieme and Jessica Gallagher, as well as The New York Times, which partnered with the Banner on what the Pulitzer Board called a “compassionate investigative series.”
It was a project the Banner had been working on for more than two years.
Baltimore Banner editor-in-chief Kimi Yoshino said in a statement, “The Pulitzer Prize is one of the highest honors in journalism, and for The Banner to receive this recognition so early in our journey is both humbling and deeply meaningful. Winning a Pulitzer speaks to the power and importance of nonprofit, locally focused journalism and is a tribute to the strength of our newsroom in uncovering the worst drug overdose crisis in U.S. history.”
Banner CEO Bob Cohn said, “It's thrilling, and humbling, to be in the company of some of the best news organizations in the country.”
For more on the Banner, check out my Poynter colleague Angela Fu with “The Baltimore Banner wins its first Pulitzer.”
Big time winners
The usual names — and big-city (i.e. the eastern part of the U.S.) — were all over the Pulitzer Prizes. The New York Times won four, including the one shared with The Baltimore Banner, as well as being named a finalist four times.
The New Yorker was a three-time winner with two other finalists. The Washington Post won two, with an additional three finalists.
This isn’t to say the board purposefully leaned into the big cities like New York and Washington. These things are cyclical. Some years, local markets get extra recognition. Just last year, my colleague Amaris Castillo wrote, “Small newsrooms won big in the 2024 Pulitzers.”
And, well, the work turned in by The New York Times, Washington Post, New Yorker and others was prize-worthy.
For more on this trend, my Poynter colleague Rick Edmonds writes “Once again, for-profit metro papers are rare among the Pulitzer winners.”
First-time winner
Esquire won the first Pulitzer Prize in its 92-year history. It went to contributor Mark Warren for Feature Writing. Warren’s story — “A Death in Alabama” — is the moving account of Bubba Copeland, a Baptist pastor and mayor of a small Alabama town who took his own life after a right-wing website exposed his private online activities.
The Esquire editors wrote Monday, “With great sensitivity, Warren, an author and a former longtime editor at Esquire, interviewed scores of Copeland’s friends, family, townspeople, and fellow congregants in order to render a heartbreaking account of the man’s final days, and to portray the full scope of the visceral, grief-stricken, perhaps counterintuitive response of a small southern town in all its rich complexity. In so doing, he illuminates how very much was lost when Copeland was driven to despair. The story explores themes of immediate, even urgent relevance: our evolving norms of gender and sexual difference, the brutal culture wars that have us tearing at one another often without thought or regard, the profound effect of social media on our lives, and the astonishing power of the Internet.”
A few more thoughts about the Pulitzers
- Speaking of the Post: For as much criticism the Post has taken because of Bezos’ forced shift of the editorial department, the news outlet’s performance in the Pulitzers (two wins, three finalists) shows the great work that is still being done there.
- Sadly, but importantly, the topic of fentanyl was the subject of not one, but two Pulitzer-winning projects. Aside from The Baltimore Banner and The New York Times winning for their report regarding the crisis in Baltimore, Reuters won the Investigative Reporting prize for, the board wrote, “a boldly reported exposé of lax regulation in the U.S. and abroad that makes fentanyl, one of the world’s deadliest drugs, inexpensive and widely available to users in the United States.” Alessandra Galloni, Reuters’ editor-in-chief, told Reuters’ Daniel Trotta, “The 'Fentanyl Express' series is a testament to the power of investigative journalism to drive change and hold those in power accountable. I'm incredibly proud of the team for their dedication to telling this important story in unique, rich and personal detail."
- 2024 was an election year, but there wasn’t really much about the actual election. The Wall Street Journal won a National Reporting Pulitzer for covering the political shift of Elon Musk, which was sort of related to the election. As I mentioned above, there was some coverage about the Trump assassination attempt, which could have played a role in the election. But that’s about it. There was nothing involving Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. Perhaps this shouldn’t be all that surprising. Looking back at the 2021 awards, there was barely a mention of the presidential election in 2020 — a year dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed.
- Notable: The Wall Street Journal was a finalist in International Reporting for its “courageous, cool-headed reporting” on one of its colleagues — Evan Gershkovich, the Journal reporter who was imprisoned in Russia on false charges of espionage. In fact, Gershkovich was one of the reporters. The Pulitzer, however, went to Declan Walsh and the staff of The New York Times for coverage of the conflict in Sudan.
- A special shoutout to a pair of newsrooms that combined to cover a natural disaster that greatly impacted their readers. The staffs of The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, and The Charlotte Observer collaborated for tireless reporting on Hurricane Helene, which killed more than 200 people and damaged some 70,000 homes and businesses in North Carolina. They didn’t win the big prize, but they were deserving finalists in Breaking News Reporting. The Washington Post was a finalist in National Reporting for coverage of Hurricane Helene, including, the board noted, “stories about the arrival of conspiracy theorists in one town and the efforts of residents of another to rebuild three months later.”
- Being a former sports columnist, I was pleased to see Washington Post sports columnist Jerry Brewer was named a finalist in Commentary for his series, “The Grievance Games” — which used sports to examine the political and social divisions in our country. Brewer told the Post’s Scott Nover, “We only think of how sports are used from the standpoint of whether athletes are speaking out or not, but oftentimes there is a countermovement. In this case, you could connect American right-wing grievance politics with sports and some of the messages that were being sent out in conjunction with the uneasy feelings that people have about how sports have changed.
More Pulitzer Prize coverage from Poynter:
