Quick Take
On Thursday evening, Lookout Santa Cruz formally received the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News, a recognition of the work done during the catastrophic January 2023 storms in Santa Cruz County. A contingent led by managing editor Tamsin McMahon and CEO Ken Doctor was on hand in New York to accept.
On Thursday evening, Lookout Santa Cruz formally received the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News, a recognition of the work done during the catastrophic January 2023 storms in Santa Cruz County. Columbia University, home of the Pulitzers, hosted the awards ceremony in the Low Memorial Library, at the center of its campus in Upper Manhattan.
Lookout’s award was the second announced, and followed Pulitzer Prize board chair Neil Brown’s praise of Lookout’s response to the flooding and of the “service” focus of much of the work, aimed at both keeping readers up to date with fact-vetted news and information – and helping people know what kind of assistance they could get where.
A crew of seven Lookouters accepted the prize, awarded by interim Columbia president Katrina Armstrong, which included an inscribed, Tiffany’s-produced crystal piece, which will soon join Lookout’s Pulitzer wall.
In total, the Pulitzer board gave out 41 awards, 15 of them in journalism and the remainder in the arts and literature.
The largest national news companies – The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press and Reuters among them – largely dominated the awards. As Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab remarked in its analysis of the awards, “This year’s Pulitzer Prizes were a coming-out party for online media — and a marker of local newspapers’ decline. Indeed, it was Lookout and the Invisible Institute of Chicago, which won two Pulitzers, that led that “party,” while many of the midsized local newspapers that used to dominate the award were not represented, showing a news industry still very much in flux.
Given the number of awards, Pulitzer policy has had a “no speeches” rule, to keep the evening moving. This year, it granted an exception, as the Pulitzer board recognized Vladimir Kara-Murza with a Commentary award for his writing in the Washington Post. Kara-Murza, released from a Siberian prison in August as part of an unprecedented 14-prisoner, American/Russian/German prisoner swap, spoke eloquently of his experience, and quickly broadened his concern to others held in Russian prisons. “I dedicate this Pulitzer to the 22 Russian journalists held by [Vladimir] Putin,” he said, one of several reminders during the evening of the increasingly tenuous role of a free press around the world.
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