Skip to main content
The 2017 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in National Reporting

Finalist: Renee Dudley, Steve Stecklow, Alexandra Harney, Irene Jay Liu and other members of the Reuters Staff

For uncovering a U.S. college admissions process corrupted by systematic cheating on standardized tests in Asia and the complicity of American officials eager to cash in on full-tuition foreign students.

Nominated Work

March 28, 2016
Cheat Sheet

Biography

Renee Dudley is a Boston-based investigative reporter. Before joining Reuters in 2015, she worked as a reporter in New York for Bloomberg News and in South Carolina for The (Charleston) Post and Courier and The (Hilton Head) Island Packet. At Bloomberg, she uncovered questionable accounting and unauthorized sales practices at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. In Charleston, her reporting led to the indictment and resignation of South Carolina’s most powerful politician. She received the Society of Professional Journalists’ Pulliam Award in 2010 for her work upholding First Amendment rights while reporting for The Island Packet.

Steve Stecklow is a London-based, global investigative reporter. He joined Reuters in 2012 after 18 years at The Wall Street Journal. His previous investigations have included a series on how Iran's Supreme Leader secretly controls a multi-billion-dollar corporate empire, the use of Western and Chinese technology by repressive regimes to crack down on dissidents, the backdating of stock options by corporate executives and corruption in the United Nations oil-for-food program.

Alexandra Harney is special correspondent for China at Reuters. Previously, she worked at the Financial Times as a reporter in China and Japan and as an editor in the UK. The author of The China Price (Penguin, 2008), which examined the human and environmental cost of China’s drive to become the world’s factory, she has also contributed to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Atlantic. Fluent in Mandarin and Japanese, Ms. Harney is a graduate of Princeton University. She lives in Shanghai.

Irene Jay Liu leads Google News Lab in the Asia-Pacific region. She was previously an investigative reporter and data editor at Reuters, special projects team leader at Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, and a statehouse reporter with the Times Union in Albany, New York. She has reported on global human smuggling networks, how China's political elite gain access to lucrative deals in state-controlled sectors, and led development of Reuters' Connected China, an immersive news app that tracks and visualizes China's elite power structure. She teaches data-driven investigative journalism at the University of Hong Kong and Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Winners

Prize Winner in National Reporting in 2017:

David A. Fahrenthold

For persistent reporting that created a model for transparent journalism in political campaign coverage while casting doubt on Donald Trump’s assertions of generosity toward charities. National Reporting

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in National Reporting in 2017:

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff

For an extraordinary series revealing the prevalence of sexual misconduct by doctors in Georgia and across the nation, many of whom continued to practice after their offenses were discovered.

The Jury

Karen Tumulty(Chair)

National Political Correspondent

Jim Boren

Executive Editor and Senior Vice President

Lee Horwich

Managing Editor, Government/Politics

Kristin Roberts

Executive Editor

E.R. Shipp*

Associate Professor, School of Global Journalism and Communications

Winners in National Reporting

2016

The Washington Post Staff

For its revelatory initiative in creating and using a national database to illustrate how often and why the police shoot to kill and who the victims are most likely to be.
2015

Carol D. Leonnig

For her smart, persistent coverage of the Secret Service, its security lapses and the ways in which the agency neglected its vital task: the protection of the president of the United States.
2014

David Philipps

For expanding the examination of how wounded combat veterans are mistreated, focusing on loss of benefits for life after discharge by the Army for minor offenses, stories augmented with digital tools and stirring congressional action.
See All National Reporting

2017 Prize Winners

Feature Writing

C. J. Chivers

For showing, through an artful accumulation of fact and detail, that a Marine’s postwar descent into violence reflected neither the actions of a simple criminal nor a stereotypical case of PTSD.
Commentary

Peggy Noonan

For rising to the moment with beautifully rendered columns that connected readers to the shared virtues of Americans during one of the nation’s most divisive political campaigns.
Criticism

Hilton Als

For bold and original reviews that strove to put stage dramas within a real-world cultural context, particularly the shifting landscape of gender, sexuality and race.
Editorial Writing

Art Cullen

For editorials fueled by tenacious reporting, impressive expertise and engaging writing that successfully challenged powerful corporate agricultural interests in Iowa.
See All 2017 Winners