Quick Take
The Pulitzer Board has created a season of podcasts focusing on the winners of 2024 Pulitzers. The episode on Lookout reconnects our correspondents and editors with the people and the places that consumed our lives in Santa Cruz County in early 2023.
It’s amazing that 10 months have passed already since Lookout Santa Cruz won our Breaking News Pulitzer Prize for our coverage of the epic January 2023 flooding that Santa Cruz County endured. Now, we can revisit it as the “Pulitzer on the Road” podcast dropped Monday.
We thank the whole perfection-driven crew, headed by Nicole Carroll (herself now off on a great local news revival) and the gang at Pineapple Studios, for their careful retelling of the story. We spent three days with them in Santa Cruz in the fall as they revisited the story throughout the county.
Carroll noted both the relative youth and mission dedication of our staff, seen here celebrating at the Pulitzer ceremony in New York.
That zeal has been maintained through all the twists and turns of life and politics in Santa Cruz County. We’ve now started to collect our most impactful stories and will keep that page updated. We appreciate all of your readership, membership and support. You can specially advance our impact reporting here as this fund takes flight. Thank you.
We’re second in this year’s podcast series, the second in this innovative project to extend awareness of the top work done in American journalism. Be sure also to listen to this year’s first episode, Anne Applebaum’s talk with Pulitzer Commentary winner Vladimir Kara-Murza. It’s a pretty timely topic: Russian imprisonment and fighting for democracy.
A couple of us had a few moments to talk with Kara-Murza after the Pulitzer ceremony at Columbia University last fall. Down to earth and improbably practical, I asked him how he survived the gulag, and sometimes solitary confinement, not knowing whether he would ever see the light of day again. Matter-of-factly, he said he figured he needed to apply his mind in that bleak environment, so he taught himself Spanish. We’re all under unforeseen pressures these days. Vladimir’s example should stay with us as we find ways forward.