The Pulitzer Prize is an award administered by Columbia University for achievements in newspaper, magazine, online journalism, literature, and musical composition in the United States. It was established in 1917 by provisions in the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made his fortune as a newspaper publisher.
The Medill School of Journalism is the journalism school of Northwestern University. It offers both undergraduate and graduate programs. It frequently ranks as the top school of journalism in the United States. Medill alumni include over 40 Pulitzer Prize laureates, numerous national correspondents for major networks, many well-known reporters, columnists and media executives.
In the early hours of February 4, 1999, an unarmed 23-year-old Guinean student named Amadou Diallo was fired upon with 41 rounds and shot a total of 19 times by four New York City Police Department plainclothes officers: Sean Carroll, Richard Murphy, Edward McMellon, and Kenneth Boss. Carroll later claimed to have mistaken Diallo for a rape suspect from one year earlier.
Sydney Hillel Schanberg was an American journalist who was best known for his coverage of the war in Cambodia. He was the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, two George Polk awards, two Overseas Press Club awards, and the Sigma Delta Chi prize for distinguished journalism. Schanberg was portrayed by Sam Waterston in the 1984 film The Killing Fields based on the experiences of Schanberg and the Cambodian journalist Dith Pran in Cambodia.
Tawana Vicenia Brawley is an African American woman from New York who gained notoriety in November 1987 at age 15 when she falsely accused four white men of kidnapping and raping her over a four-day period.
Jay Anthony Lukas was an American journalist and author, best known for his 1985 book Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families. Common Ground is a classic study of race relations, class conflict, and school busing in Boston, Massachusetts, as seen through the eyes of three families: one upper-middle-class white, one working-class white, and one working-class African-American.
Janet Leslie Cooke is an American former journalist. She received a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for an article written for The Washington Post. The story was later discovered to have been fabricated and Cooke returned the prize, the only person to date to do so, after admitting she had fabricated stories. The prize was awarded instead to Teresa Carpenter, a nominee who had lost to Cooke.
Gareth Cook is an American journalist and editor. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for “explaining, with clarity and humanity, the complex scientific and ethical dimensions of stem cell research.” Cook is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, is also the series editor of The Best American Infographics and editor of Mind Matters, Scientific American's neuroscience blog. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe, Wired, and Scientific American.
Charles Laurence Strum was an American journalist and author. He worked as a senior editor at The New York Times from 1979 until his retirement in 2014.
Michael G. Taibbi is an American television journalist best known for his work at NBC News.
The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting is an American news media organization established in 2006 that sponsors independent reporting on global issues that other media outlets are less willing or able to undertake on their own. The center's goal is to raise the standard of coverage of international systemic crises and to do so in a way that engages both the broad public and government policy-makers. The organization is based in Washington, D.C.
Robert Dennis McFadden is an American journalist who has worked for The New York Times since 1961. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996.
Adam Moss is an American magazine and newspaper editor. From 2004 to 2019, he was the editor-in-chief of New York magazine. Under his editorship, New York was repeatedly recognized for excellence, notably winning Magazine of the Year in 2013, and General Excellence both in print and online in 2010. New York won more National Magazine Awards under his tenure than any other magazine overall. During this period, he oversaw the development and growth of New York’s website into one repeatedly recognized as among the industry's most innovative and successful, launching the standalone sites Vulture and the Cut, among others. In 2018 New York's senior art critic Jerry Saltz won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism.
Dele Olojede is a Nigerian journalist and former foreign editor for Newsday. He is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his work covering the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. He serves on the board of EARTH University, in Costa Rica, and of The Markup, the New York-based investigative journalism organization focused on the impact of large tech platforms and their potential for human manipulation. He is the founder and host of Africa In the World, a hearts and minds festival held annually in Stellenbosch, in the Cape winelands of South Africa. He was a patron of the Etisalat Prize for Literature.
Thomas Zeller Jr. is an American journalist who has covered poverty, technology, energy policy and the environment, among other topics, for a variety of publications, including 12 years on staff as a writer and editor at The New York Times. He has also held staff positions at National Geographic Magazine and The Huffington Post.
Haynes Bonner Johnson was an American journalist, author, and television analyst. He reported on most of the major news stories of the latter half of the 20th century and was widely regarded as one of the top American political commentators.
Etheleen Renee Shipp is an American journalist and columnist. As a columnist for the New York Daily News, she was awarded the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for "her penetrating columns on race, welfare and other social issues."
Ian Urbina is an American investigative reporter who has written for a variety of outlets, including The New York Times and The Atlantic. Urbina is the author of The New York Times bestsellerThe Outlaw Ocean and founder of journalism nonprofit, The Outlaw Ocean Project.
Melvin L. Claxton is an American journalist, author, and entrepreneur. He has written about crime, corruption, and the abuse of political power. He is best known for his 1995 series of investigative reports on corruption in the criminal justice system in the U.S. Virgin Islands and its links to the region's crime rate. His series earned the Virgin Islands Daily News the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1995. Another series by Claxton, this time on the criminal justice system in Detroit, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2003. Claxton has won a number of national reporting awards and his work has been honored several times by the Associated Press managing editors. He is the founder and CEO of Epic 4D, an educational video game company.
Howard Van Smith, was an American journalist. A longtime staffer for The Miami News and several other newspapers, he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1959.
