JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

I always know when the Pulitzer Prizes have been awarded because a story pops up on The Star’s website saying Melinda Henneberger of the editorial page was once again a finalist.

And so it was today that Henneberger is, for the third year in a row, a PP finalist.

Now, this is a big deal for The Star and for Henneberger, and it’s too bad she’s been a bridesmaid three successive years. For the life of me, however, I don’t understand why The Star does these blinkers-on stories, year after year, without listing the actual winners of the Pulitzers.

That is a much bigger deal than The Star finishing second, and it reflects, once again, how parochial the hometown paper has become under Mike Fannin’s leadership and, more broadly, under the old and new McClatchy management.

It’s also a big reason why circulation has been in free fall and why the paper doesn’t have anything close to the influence it used to have over such things as civic projects, local elections and state and local government. It’s a shell of what it used to be.

I’m not going to harp on it any more because this has been unfolding before our eyes the last decade or so. But it’s worth noting, and I hope my constructive criticism will be noted somewhere down at 16th and McGee…at 16th and Mcgee until the end of the year, when the last of the paper’s employees there will be moving someplace else.

You wouldn’t know it from The Star, but the Pulitzer Prizes reflect the ongoing strength of traditional and non-traditional media nationwide. (Perhaps the most noteworthy non-traditional recipient of a Pulitzer this year was the publication Runner’s World.)

With that in mind, let’s move on to the Pulitzer Prize winners, who were announced announced today at a ceremony at Columbia University.

And I am pleased to report that we did have one local winner, Chris Haxel of KCUR, who contributed a podcast to the Guns & America national reporting project. Haxel was one of four NPR correspondents who shared the prize for Audio Reporting.

Here are the others…

Special Citation: Darnella Frazier, who was 17 when she recorded George Floyd being asphyxiated under the knee of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. She testified at Chauvin’s trial, and her video contradicted the initial police account of Floyd’s death.

Breaking News Reporting: The staff of The (Minneapolis) Star Tribune for coverage of Floyd’s death and the reverberations that followed.

Investigative Reporting: Matt Rocheleau, Vernal Coleman, Laura Crimaldi, Evan Allen and Brendan McCarthy of The Boston Glove for reporting that uncovered state governments’ systematic failure to share information about dangerous truck drivers.

Explanatory Reporting: (Two sets of winners) Ed Yong of The Atlantic for a series of pieces on the COVID-19 pandemic, and Andrew Chung, Lawrence Hurley, Andrea Januta, Jaimi Dowdell and Jackie Botts of Reuters for an examination of the legal doctrine of “qualified immunity” and how it shields police who use excessive force from prosecution.

Local Reporting: Kathleen McGrory and Neil Bedi of the Tampa Bay Times for reporting that exposed how a powerful and politically connected sheriff built a secretive intelligence operation to earmark children who might “fall into a life of crime” based on factors like whether they’d been abused or received a failing grade in school.

National Reporting: The staffs of The Marshall Project, Alabama Media Group, The Indianapolis Star and the Invisible Institute for a yearlong investigation of K-9 units and the damage that police dogs inflict on Americans.

International Reporting: Megha Rajagopalan, Alison Killing and Christo Buschek of BuzzFeed News for a series of stories that used satellite imagery, architectural expertise and interviews with two dozen former prisoners to identify a vast new infrastructure built by the Chinese government for the mass detention of Muslims.

Feature Writing: (Two winners) Nadja Drost, freelance contributor to The California Sunday Magazine (which went out of business last October) for an account of global migration documenting a group’s journey on foot through the Central American Darién Gap, one of the most dangerous migrant routes in the world, and Mitchell S. Jackson, freelance contributor to Runner’s World, for an account of the killing of Ahmaud Arbery that shed light on systemic racism in America.

Commentary: Michael Paul Williams of the Richmond (Virginia) Times-Dispatch for columns that led Richmond, a former capital of the Confederacy, through the painful and complicated process of dismantling the city’s monuments to white supremacy. (In this category, Henneberger was a finalist for “tenacious and deeply reported columns on failures in the criminal justice system.” One of her columns column was about Kansas City Police Chief Rick Smith‘s failure to utter a word about George Floyd’s death for six days and then not naming him when he did talk about it.)

Criticism: Wesley Morris of The New York Times for criticism on the intersection of race and culture in America.

Editorial Writing: Robert Greene of the Los Angeles Times for editorials on policing, bail reform, prisons and mental health in Los Angeles.

Breaking News Photography: The staff of The Associated Press for a collection of photographs from multiple U.S. cities capturing the country’s response to Floyd’s death.

Feature photography: Emilio Morenatti of The Associated Press for a series of photographs that took viewers into the lives of elderly people in Spain struggling during the pandemic.

Audio Reporting: Chris Haxel, Lisa Hagen, Graham Smith and Robert Little of NPR for an investigative series on no-compromise gun rights activists that illuminated the deepening schism between American conservatives.

Public Service reporting: The New York Times for sweeping coverage of the coronavirus pandemic that exposed racial and economic inequities, government failures in the U.S. and beyond, and filled a data vacuum that helped local governments, health care providers, businesses and individuals to be better prepared and protected.