J-School alums win Pulitzer Prizes

Cheers rang out through newsrooms around the country when the 2015 Pulitzer Prizes were announced, and a pair of J-School alums was among those to win awards for their coverage of two very somber stories.

The Seattle Times staff won a Pulitzer Prize for its breaking news reporting of a mudslide in Washington state that killed 43 people in March 2014. The Times staff includes J-School alums Jim Simon (class of 1984), a deputy managing editor for the paper, business reporter Ángel González (’03), and reporter Alexa Vaughn (’11). In the wake of the mudslide, the paper also investigated whether people should have been living in that area to begin with, and if the tragedy could have been avoided.

When she thinks about how her experience at the J-School helped to equip her for that kind of reporting, Vaughn credits new media instructors like Richard Koci Hernandez and Josh Williams for teaching her how to report a story for different media. She also points to her experience reporting for Richmond Confidential, one of the school’s two hyperlocal news websites.

“[A]t Berkeley I learned how a team of reporters could collaborate on comprehensive coverage of a major media event,” Vaugh explained in an email. “That experience came from Richmond Confidential’s first major breaking/national story on a gruesome assault at Richmond High.”

Gregory Winter (’00), an editor for the New York Times‘ international desk, won an award in the International Reporting category for the paper’s coverage of the Ebola outbreak in Africa. The Pulitzer board honored the paper for its “courageous front-line reporting and vivid human stories”

Winter reflected on the Ebola coverage: “It became abundantly clear, very early on, that Ebola was going to be one of the most important stories of the year,” he told the Times. “So our correspondents logged at least a year of total reporting and shooting time within the affected countries in West Africa.”