The 2020 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced on Monday, but a lot of Kansas City area residents might not know about it: I don’t think a single local media operation ran a story.
Just like last year, The Star published a maddeningly narrow story, saying that editorial board member Melinda Henneberger was a finalist, as she was in 2019.
And just like last year, The Star’s story was misleading, in that, for much of the story, it sounded like Henneberger, as a finalist, was still in the running for the big prize.
It was not until the twelfth paragraph that the story indicated the competition was over and that someone else — Jeffery Gerritt of the Herald Press in Palestine, TX — had won the prize in editorial writing.
In equally maddening and parochial fashion, The Star did not report the winners in any other category.
(Note: Today’s print edition, which was delivered after this post was published, carried a story about three Kansas writers who were recognized in the fiction, nonfiction and feature writing categories.)
…Prizes were awarded in 13 different journalistic categories for work published in 2019. Here are the winners in several categories.
Breaking News
The award went to my hometown paper, The Courier Journal, in Louisville, KY. The CJ’s staff uncovered how last-minute pardons by Kentucky’s departing governor, Matt Bevin, were made unilaterally and violated legal norms. More than a dozen Courier Journal staffers were involved in the coverage, which included an ambitious digital presentation of Bevin’s actions and his explanations and a racial breakdown of those whose sentences he commuted. Two days before Christmas Eve, the newsroom also produced an eight-page special section. The CJ is owned by Gannett.
Public Service
The winners were The Anchorage Daily News and Pro Publica for a year-long investigation of sexual violence in Alaska.
Investigative Reporting
Thirty-one-year-old Brian M. Rosenthal of The New York Times received the award for a five-part series on how reckless loans, handed out by a group of taxi medallion owners, put thousands of immigrants in debt while bankers made huge profits.
Explanatory Reporting
The staff of The Washington Post prevailed for a series on global warming. The series demonstrated how parts of the earth have already warmed by 2 degrees Celsius, a threshold scientists consider dangerous.
Local Reporting
The staff of the Baltimore Sun won for exposing illegal self-dealing by Mayor Catherine Pugh. The reporting resulted in the mayor’s resignation and her being sentenced to three years in prison.
National Reporting
Two organizations were honored. Three Pro Publica reporters won for an investigation of a series of accidents in involving America’s 7th Fleet, and four Seattle Times reporters took similar honors for coverage that exposed design flaws in Boeing’s 737 Max.
Audio Reporting
This American Life got the first Pulitzer awarded for audio journalism for a story that focused on the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy and how it affected asylum seekers.
International Reporting
The staff of The New York Times won for a series of stories that exposed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s predatory regime, including its successful effort to destabilize elections.
Commentary
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times won for her Times Magazine spread, “The 1619 Project,” which re-evaluated and re-centered the role of African-Americans, including enslaved people, in American history. (Her project took up most or all of one magazine issue.)
Editorial Cartoons
The winner was Barry Blitt, who has contributed cartoons to The New Yorker for more than 30 years. He was honored for a series of unflattering caricatures of President Trump, like this one…
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One more thing about The Star…It took a mighty swing at a Pulitzer in the investigative reporting category with its “Throwaway Kids” series, about foster children and problem-plagued, state foster-care programs.
It was a good series, but it seemed to me to have been mapped out primarily with the goal of winning a Pulitzer. The reporters, as well as Editor/President/Publisher/Zoom-conference-coordinator Mike Fannin, must be smarting; the series not only didn’t win, it was not one of two other finalists. (As I said above, Brian Rosenthal of The Times was the winner in the investigative category.)
Here is a complete list of the 2020 winners in all categories.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
Must have been a slow news day!
It is saddening to see the Pulitzer jury award a prize for the “1619 Project” in The New York Times, which has been condemned by various distinguished American historians as an uninformed and erroneous racialist screed.
Have you ever seen such a small newspaper overloaded with award-chasing opinion columnists? Imagine if some of that salary went to hire more reporters?
LaDene Morton, a local writer who focuses on Kansas City history, submitted a comment by email. Here it is…
I couldn’t agree more – the reporting of the Pulitzers was non-reporting. But I was disappointed that you stopped at journalism, for as you know, there are many other categories, including photography which, in this context, is a big part of the journalistic function. But also very disappointed that you didn’t mention the local who did win (shared) the Pulitzer – for Non-Fiction. Topeka native, and current KCAI Professor Anne Boyer won for “The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art,Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care,” a memoir based on her own battle with cancer, that looks at medical care and social class. I’d never heard of her before this, but she has an impressive body of work. As a non-fiction writer myself – with considerably less prestige, I admit – I had to raise up this accomplishment. Thanks.
The New York Times piece was amazing about the taxi medallions. I had no idea the writer was so young. I look forward to following his career. BTW, Fannin makes every decision based on the chance to win a Pulitzer, not what is best for the community or the news organization.
With McClatchy in bankruptcy and the future of the McClatchy papers up in the air, Fannin’s window of opportunity to win a Pulitzer may have passed.
Surprised but pleased that Pulitzer “Finalist” Melinda Henneberger has remained at the Star. She is a gifted reporter and columnist, with just the right acerbic wit for skewering the deserved. A favorite among her work is her November 2018 personal narrative,”After a lifetime, the Catholic Church has finally driven me out.” She was speaking for and to many.
For reasons that Mr. Hoffman mentions above I think the public has grown weary of these self congratulatory, back slapping awards. The audience for the Oscars, for instance, dwindles with each passing year and the only thing keeping the Golden Globes afloat for the past few years has been Ricky Gervais ridiculing the plastic, tone deaf Hollywood elite.
As for these awards, discovering corruption in a major city, please. The real question is why there aren’t more stories like that. Making fun of Trump? The entire media establishment has made asses out of themselves by reinforcing Trump’s claims of fake news. The real award should have gone to a journalist somewhere, anywhere who demonstrated ruthless objectivity in their reporting on him. (I know many of you think they have been, but every day on social media CNN, WAPO and NYT stories become the subject of satire from sites like The Babylon Bee. If people actually expressed what they really thought about the establishment media, they’d all be given 30 days in Herr Zuckerberg’s gulag.)
I never met Mike Fannin during my time at The Star but I have no doubt that what Allison Long stated is true. Zieman was the same way. And I wonder if the Pulitzer Committee realizes that. Lose the ego, Fannin. Big attention-getting exposes are fine but should not come at the expense of covering the community and making EVERY local official accountable. And yes, The Star should have led its Pulitzer story with the KC Art Institute instructor’s win over the bridesmaid.
Jim, did you get in on the Pulitzer Prize the Star won in 1982, it would have been, for its coverage of the skywalk collapse at the Hyatt Regency in the summer of 1981? Dad ended up with one of the medals, which was put away for safekeeping many years ago, and while I am sure he rightfully took some pride, healthy pride, in having helped the paper win that prize, in the end a medal is a medal is a medal – that and $2.00 will get you a cup of coffee.
Yes, Rick…I’ve got one of those medals. I was the re-write man on one of two front-page stories we wrote the night it happened. The newsroom was so chaotic I thought (and wrote) that “a skywalk collapsed,” when, in actuality, of course, it was two skywalks — the upper and lower. That was a little embarrassing, but I never heard a word about it.