Award season 2022 continued: The Pulitzer Prizes

Stand-out journalism produced last year was honored in the release of the 2022 Pulitzer Prizes, celebrating the best of the craft and affirming the importance of serious, creative journalism in chaotic times. It’s not the first time in history that called on journalists to witness and record epic events, but it likely will go down as one of the most demanding. Winning work ranged from breaking news coverage of condo building in Miami to explorations of the racial divide in America to stories about the environment and the pandemic. If there were patterns, it were in the dominance of accountability journalism and of big-name news organizations. Of note was a special citation awarded to the journalists of Ukraine. From the citation:

Despite bombardment, abductions, occupation and even deaths in their ranks, they have persisted in their effort to provide an accurate picture of a terrible reality, doing honor to Ukraine and to journalists around the world.

We encourage you to spend a bit of time in the next days and weeks studying all the winners and finalists, along with those from other prestigious contests. We will continue to go behind-the-scenes on pieces that have a special connection to the Storyboard mission, which is to celebrate and study the art and craft of story.

As part of that, consider these earlier posts of work that rose on this year’s Pulitzer list:

The award for Public Service, considered the gold medal of the Pulitzers, went to the Washington Post for it’s  deeply reported three-part series “The Attack,”  which re-reported and retold the events of the planning, assault and aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. From the Pulitzer citation:

The Washington Post for its compellingly told and vividly presented account of the assault on Washington on January 6, 2021, providing the public with a thorough and unflinching understanding of one of the nation’s darkest days.

In a Notable Narrative essay for Storyboard on the one-year anniversary of the assault, veteran editor and journalism professor Tom Warhover analyzed what makes “The Attack” work as storytelling, and how he uses it to teach his students everything from structure to transparency to reporting diligence.

Jennifer Senior of the Atlantic now has the rare distinction of winning both the Pulitzer and the National Magazine Award in feature writing for “Twenty Years Gone: What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind.”. Senior tracked the journeys of grief traveled by those who loved Bobby McIlvaine, a quirky and brilliant charmer who died, at age 26, in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. In her piece, Senior reveals her own connections to McIlvaine and his family, and what it took to revisit their collective pain. In an interview with Storyboard contributor Trevor Pyle, she walked through her process, her emotions and how she set nontraditional source boundaries.

The top prize for General Nonfiction Book went to Andrea Elliott for her methodical and sensitive follow to the 2013 story of Dasani Coates, a girl from a a large and often-homeless family in Brooklyn. Eight years later, Elliott returned readers to Dasani’s life in “Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City;” an 11,000-word excerpt from the book was published by The New York Times. Chicago journalist Bonnie Miller Rubin spoke with Elliott for Storyboard about the challenges of navigating relationships, time, ethics and structure for her extended story about Dasani.