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The 2019 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Investigative Reporting
For a distinguished example of investigative reporting, using any available journalistic tool, Fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000).

Matt Hamilton, Harriet Ryan and Paul Pringle of the Los Angeles Times

For consequential reporting on a University of Southern California gynecologist accused of violating hundreds of young women for more than a quarter-century.

Paul Pringle (left), Matt Hamilton and Harriet Ryan accept the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting from Columbia University President Lee Bollinger. (Eileen Barroso/Columbia University)

Winning Work

Biography

Matt Hamilton is a reporter in the Metro section for the Los Angeles Times. He has covered legal affairs, crime and breaking news across California. He joined The Times in 2013 as an intern reporting on criminal trials in Los Angeles County. Hamilton was part of the team of reporters that received a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino. He grew up in Delaware and studied Catholic theology at Boston College. Before completing a degree in journalism at the University of Southern California, he edited magazines in Amman, Jordan.

Harriet Ryan is an investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Since joining the paper in 2008, she has written about high-profile people, including Phil Spector, Michael Jackson and Britney Spears, and institutions, including USC, the Catholic Church, the Kabbalah Centre and Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin. She previously worked at Court TV and the Asbury Park Press. She is a graduate of Columbia University.

Paul Pringle is a Los Angeles Times reporter who specializes in investigating corruption. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2009 and a member of reporting teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 2004 and 2011. Pringle won the George Polk Award in 2008, the same year the Society of Professional Journalists of Greater Los Angeles honored him as a distinguished journalist. In 2012, he shared in Harvard University’s Worth Bingham Prize. Pringle won the California Newspaper Publishers Assn.’s First Amendment Award in 2014 and the University of Florida’s Joseph L. Brechner Award in 2015.

 

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Investigative Reporting in 2019:

David Barstow, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner of The New York Times

For an exhaustive 18-month investigation of President Donald Trump’s finances that debunked his claims of self-made wealth and revealed a business empire riddled with tax dodges. (Moved by the Board to the Explanatory Reporting category.)

Kathleen McGrory and Neil Bedi of the Tampa Bay Times

For impactful reporting, based on sophisticated data analysis, that revealed an alarming rate of patient fatalities following Johns Hopkins’ takeover of a pediatric heart treatment facility.

The Jury

Matthew Doig(Chair)

Network Investigations Editor

Michael J. Berens*

Investigative Reporter

David Boardman

Dean, Klein College of Media and Communications, Temple University

Michael I. Days

Vice President, Diversity & Inclusion

Chris Hamby*

Investigative Reporter

Joe Sexton

Senior Editor

Jeff Taylor*

Executive Editor, News, USA Today

Winners in Investigative Reporting

2018

Staff of The Washington Post

For purposeful and relentless reporting that changed the course of a Senate race in Alabama by revealing a candidate’s alleged past sexual harassment of teenage girls and subsequent efforts to undermine the journalism that exposed it.
2017

Eric Eyre

For courageous reporting, performed in the face of powerful opposition, to expose the flood of opioids flowing into depressed West Virginia counties with the highest overdose death rates in the country.
2015

Eric Lipton

For reporting that showed how the influence of lobbyists can sway congressional leaders and state attorneys general, slanting justice toward the wealthy and connected.
See All Investigative Reporting

2019 Prize Winners

Feature Writing

Hannah Dreier of ProPublica

For a series of powerful, intimate narratives that followed Salvadoran immigrants on New York’s Long Island whose lives were shattered by a botched federal crackdown on the international criminal gang MS-13.
See All 2019 Winners