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

Just like last year, I learned belatedly that a Kansas City journalist had won a Pulitzer prize.

Last year, after I had posted my Pulitzer story, my friend Dan Margolies at KCUR informed me that a colleague of his, Chris Haxel, had been one of four NPR correspondents who shared the prize for Audio Reporting. Haxel had contributed a podcast to the Guns & America national reporting project.

I worked that into the post an hour or so after publication.

This year, it took me nearly a full day to find out that a Kansas City reporter had won a Pulitzer this year.

I found out by reading The Beacon’s morning, emailed newsletter.

The local winner was a young woman named Madison Hopkins, who for the last seven months has worked as health care accountability reporter for The Beacon, which made its debut two years ago.

Madison, who, I believe, is in her late 20s, did not win for work she has done for The Beacon but for a series she worked on at her previous employer, the Better Government Association in Chicago.

Madison and 28-year-old Cecila Reyes of the Chicago Tribune collaborated on an examination of Chicago’s long history of failed building- and fire-safety code enforcement, which gave unscrupulous landlords the opportunity to commit serious violations that resulted in dozens of unnecessary deaths.

This was not, of course, the first Pulitzer for the Trib, but it was for the 99-year-old BGA, a non-partisan, nonprofit news organization that works for transparency, efficiency and accountability in government in Chicago and across Illinois.

Hopkins’ and Reyes’ series, which ran in April 2021, followed more than a year of reporting and uncovered 61 deaths from fires in buildings that, the BGA said, “the city knew had fire safety issues, sometimes for years.”

The investigation highlighted the city’s failure to follow up on complaints about hazards and how the city put landlords’ interests ahead of tenants’ safety.

Most of the 61 people who died were Black.

This Pulitzer was for local reporting, a very prestigious category. It was in the local category that The Kansas City Star and Times won the 1982 Pulitzer for their overall coverage of the Hyatt Regency disaster.

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Hopkins’ award says a lot not only about her but also about Kelsey Ryan, who founded The Beacon, a non-profit, online news outlet focused, according to its website, “on in-depth journalism in the public interest.”

Ryan was hired by The Star in 2017 and a year and a half later was summarily laid off. Her reaction? After getting a 7 a.m. phone call apprising her of the news, she “had a good cry” and immediately set about determining what she would do next.

It only took her a few hours…

“By 3 p.m., my work email was downloaded and my resume updated. And by 5 p.m., I realized I really didn’t want to ever work for another McClatchy paper. Or Gannett. Or GateHouse. Or (insert name of struggling newspaper company here). That in some ways, going to another newspaper was the easy route, to grab a lifeboat and hope it won’t sink itself in the next year or two. To bury my head in the sand, pretending more layoffs wouldn’t happen. Instead, I decided I would build a new ship.“

She christened and launched that ship less than two year later. It’s done well enough that she was able to expand last year to Wichita, where she worked for The Eagle before working at The Star. (The Eagle is also a McClatchy paper.)

When Kelsey hired Madison last fall, I don’t know if she had any idea Madison would be in the hunt for a Pulitzer several months later. But, in any event, the hiring is a testament to Kelsey’s managerial instincts and experience. Kelsey now has a Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter on her staff, which should help raise The Beacon’s profile and readership.

…A final note: I find it ironic that where The Star’s Pulitzer-Prize winner, Melinda Henneberger, is looking at KC in the rear view mirror, on her way to The Sacramento Bee, Madison Hopkins is barely out of the car and still probably finding her way around town.

Let’s hope she stays a while and makes a big contribution to local journalism.

You can see some of her stories for The Beacon here.