Poynter Org 2017 Tiny Family Run Newspaper Wins Pulitzer Prize Taking Big Business 455465
A number of important local stories were leading the website of the Storm Lake Times, circulation 3,000, on Tuesday morning. Second-grader Alejandra Gonzales found a four-leaf clover in the field backside her school. A local woman had bought and renovated a building to house 25 elderly cats.
And in a modest proclamation of just a sentence, some other notable local happening: on Monday, Art Cullen, the paper's owner and editor, was awarded a Pulitzer prize, the about prestigious honor in global journalism, for his editorial writing. Fellow honorees for 2017 include the rather improve read New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Miami Herald.
The twice-weekly newspaper, serving a town of a little over 10,000 people, may not previously accept been widely read outside Buena Vista county, northward-due west Iowa, only Cullen'due south editorials – "fuelled by tenacious reporting, impressive expertise and engaging writing that successfully challenged powerful corporate agricultural interests in Iowa" – certainly caught the attention of the Pulitzer committee. He beat writers from the Washington Post and Houston Chronicle to the award.
The paper will pocket $15,000 (£12,000) – no small sum for its nine staff, which include Cullen, his brother John (the paper's publisher), son Tom (reporter), married woman Dolores (photographer) and John's wife Mary (writer of the My Favourite Recipes cavalcade). The family unit dog Mabel ("the news hound") is some other newsroom regular.
The prize was not exactly expected. Cullen, 59, was watching a livestream video on the Pulitzer site, he told Poynter, "and they went through national reporting, local reporting, etc, and then got to editorial writing and said "Art Cullen", and I started screaming to my blood brother, "Holy shit, we won!" ... I started screaming and he thought I had gone nuts."
The office of the Times, which was founded in 1990 past John Cullen, does not take much in common with the flashy, glass-fronted newsrooms of many of those he beat to the prize, he said. "I sit with piles of newspapers around three-calendar week-old page proofs, and people can come up in and start yelling at me. The function is a wreck. Information technology'due south a whole different environs."
And so information technology proved on Tuesday when, newly famous honor-winner or not, Cullen spent much of the day batting away interview requests from international media; Tuesday is press day in Storm Lake, and the newspaper wasn't getting out without the easily-on attention of its editor.
Like any successful local paper, the Times knows what its readers want. "We strive to have a baby, a canis familiaris, a fire and a crash on every front page," Cullen has said. Only the Pulitzer was awarded for a very different kind of journalism, after the paper began looking into a lawsuit brought by Des Moines Water Works, the publicly owned water utility in the Iowa capital, against three counties, including Buena Vista, for releasing too much nitrogen from farming into the river from which it draws its drinking water.
The counties fought the suit, funded past undisclosed sources, and the Tempest Lake Times wanted to find out if they were, equally it suspected, "hundreds of secret saccharide daddies from the seed/petrochemical industry".
"All we are truly asking [is] how much is the neb and who is paying it?" Cullen wrote on 18 March, 2016. "You always follow the paymaster. If Subcontract Bureau [an agronomical lobby group] is signing the check, and then y'all know who is really calling the shots on our behalf. We elected a board of supervisors and a canton attorney to direct the policies and protect the taxpayers of this county. Nosotros did not elect the Farm Agency or any other interest grouping to ready our course."
The water utility's accommodate was ultimately unsuccessful, but Cullen said he felt vindicated that the paper, with the support of the Iowa Liberty of Data Council, had got the information released.
Outspoken criticism of agribusiness is not necessarily a popular position in a land that is heavily dominated by agriculture. But in the 27 years of the paper's existence, Cullen says he and John have been "obsessed" with changes to farming do in the country, and the impact they have had on the local environment.
"Anyone with eyes and a nose knows in his gut that Iowa has the dirtiest surface water in America," he wrote in one of his award-winning pieces. "Information technology is choking the waterworks and the Gulf of Mexico. It is causing oxygen deprivation in n-due west Iowa glacial lakes … Everyone knows it's not the city sewer plant causing the problem. And virtually of usa recognize that this is not just nature at work busily releasing nitrates into the water."
It is not the only unpopular position the paper has taken. The fact that Buena Vista is a solidly Republican county (it voted past 59.2% for Donald Trump in November) did not stop Cullen describing him before the election as a "Frankenstein" [sic] created by the Republican party "through racism, sexism, nationalism and obstructionism".
Winning the prize, meanwhile, would not signal an cease to their coverage of the h2o pollution story. "They've changed the unabridged agronomical organization since 1980, without any consideration [for] how it affects groundwater or surface water," he told the Washington Post. "It'south a national story. It'south simply that information technology happened in our front g and we're still reporting on it."
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/apr/11/tiny-newspaper-in-us-wins-pulitzer-prize-for-taking-on-big-business
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