For over six months, an investigative team at the Spanish daily El Mundo has been waiting to hear whether they will face criminal prosecution for disobeying a legal injunction to stop publishing reports about alleged tax fraud by professional athletes … Read more
University newspapers generally come alive at night, and on a recent gloomy weekday afternoon the office of The Cornell Daily Sun is dimly lit and nearly empty. Housed in a former Elks lodge in downtown Ithaca, New York, the … Read more
I first read the lie under a competitor’s byline: the results of DNA testing on a rape case I was covering. My reporting partner and I didn’t know it was false but believed we’d been beaten on a story. We … Read more
Two days after the election, one of our reporters spoke to teenagers at Topeka High School who said they were bullied and threatened with Donald Trump-inspired sexual assault. The story angered Diane Smith, a reader who fired off an email to … Read more
One way to think of the job journalism does is telling a community about itself, and on those terms the American media failed spectacularly this election cycle. That Donald Trump’s victory came as such a surprise—a systemic shock, really—to both … Read more
For many mornings on my way into the Chicago Tribune newsroom, I passed by an Arthur Miller quote engraved in the lobby: “A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.” That sentiment, as sturdy as the travertine … Read more
In the final hours of the U.S. election, Republican nominee Donald Trump speculated on Fox News that the contest was rigged against him. “There are machines,” he noted. “You put down Republican and it registers them … Read more
From the start, the Pulitzer Prizes have sought to recognize journalists for investigating how power works, for holding the powerful to account, and for exposing abuses of power. Yet power itself ebbs and shifts, driven by cultural, political, and … Read more
In the investigative series “Cashing in on Kids,” Rutledge exposed the poor oversight and fraud that were hallmarks of Wisconsin’s $350 million taxpayer-subsidized child-care system. Her stories prompted a crackdown on fraudulent daycare providers. The … Read more
AP correspondent Margie Mason was reporting another story in Jakarta, Indonesia when her source asked why she wasn’t looking into the hundreds and hundreds of men enslaved in the Southeast Asian fishing industry. She knew about this. It was … Read more