FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Media Contact:
Marjorie Miller, Administrator, The Pulitzer Prizes
[email protected] or 212-854-3841
New York, NY (March 25, 2024) – The Pulitzer Prizes today announced the launch of a podcast, part of a broad public outreach initiative celebrating the work of Pulitzer Prize winners with audiences across the country.
The six podcast episodes of Pulitzer on the Road will be released weekly beginning today, each featuring 2023 winners in Journalism and Books in conversation with Pulitzer Board members, delving into the stories behind their work.
Guests on this spring’s podcast series include Fiction winners Barbara Kingsolver and Hernan Diaz; Explanatory Reporting winner Caitlin Dickerson of The Atlantic; Local Reporting winners John Archibald and Ashley Remkus from AL.com; and Public Service named contributor Mstyslav Chernov of the team at the Associated Press.
"Pulitzer on the Road is an effort to offer audiences insights into how these works are produced and what makes them prize-worthy,” said Pulitzer Prize Administrator Marjorie Miller. “We want to show how journalism and the arts play important roles in democracy.”
The podcast is produced and hosted by Board member Nicole Carroll, a professor of practice at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. The six episodes also feature Pulitzer Board members Neil Brown, president of the Poynter Institute; Boston Globe Editor Nancy Barnes; Ginger Thompson, ProPublica’s chief of correspondents; University of California, Los Angeles historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez; Emily Ramshaw, chief executive officer of The 19th; and author Viet Thanh Nguyen of the University of Southern California.
In the first episode, released today, reporter John Archibald talks to Brown about how the news team of AL.com uncovered police corruption in Brookside, Alabama to win the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. The journalists showed that officers preyed on residents to increase revenue by 640% in two years, largely from pulling over drivers on misdemeanor charges, confiscating cars and saddling citizens with fines and fees of hundreds to thousands of dollars.
In subsequent episodes released over the next five weeks, Caitlin Dickerson from The Atlantic explains the evolution of the Trump administration’s Zero Tolerance policy of taking children from their immigrant parents at the border. Mstyslav Chernov of the Associated Press recounts how he and his team were the last international journalists in Mariupol, Ukraine, when the Russia invasion began. They won Pulitzer Prizes in Explanatory Reporting and Public Service, respectively.
“I hope listeners come away feeling the impact of this work,” host Carroll said.
“In Brookside, reporters uncovered a police scheme that was costing local citizens dearly. In Mariupol, the AP journalists exposed Russian atrocities while placing themselves in grave danger. This type of journalism is time consuming, it’s costly and it’s critically important. With the other authors, I hope this podcast encourages people to read and discuss their thought-provoking work,” Carroll said.
Other episodes will feature the Prizes for Books. 2023 History winner Jefferson Cowie travels back to Eufaula, Alabama, to show the evolution and terrible consequences of white supremacy in one town. There were two Fiction winners in 2023 and each is featured in an episode: author Hernan Diaz shares stories behind his winning novel, “Trust”; and Barbara Kingsolver discusses “Demon Copperhead,” her novel of coming of age in Appalachia.
The Pulitzer on the Road Podcast will be released each Monday through April 29 and will be accessible on Apple, Spotify and other platforms.
The 2024 Pulitzer Prizes will be announced on Monday, May 6.
The Pulitzer on the Road Podcast is produced in collaboration with the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, and Central Sound at Arizona PBS, with the support of the Knight Foundation. Miller is the executive producer.
The Pulitzer Prizes, which are administered at Columbia University, were established by Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian-American journalist and newspaper publisher, who left money to Columbia University upon his death in 1911. A portion of his bequest was used to found the School of Journalism in 1912 and establish the Pulitzer Prizes, which were first awarded in 1917.
The 18-member Pulitzer Prize board is composed mainly of leading journalists or news executives from media outlets across the U.S., as well as five academics or persons in the arts. The dean of Columbia's journalism school and the administrator of the prizes are non-voting members. The chair rotates to the most senior member or members. The board is self-perpetuating in the election of members. Voting members may serve three terms of three years for a total of nine years