The News Literacy Project joins the Pulitzer centennial celebration

The Pulitzer centennial committee is sponsoring a series of events across the country to honor “100 years of excellence in journalism and the arts.” It has invited NLP — whose leadership and journalist fellows include numerous Pulitzer Prize winners — to be a part of the celebration. The Pulitzer Prize, awarded annually to news publications for public service and to individual journalists for excellence in a variety of categories, is journalism’s highest honor.

Educators and students who have participated with NLP will attend special events in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Student journalists from three NLP partner schools in New York will join the national press corps at Columbia University’s Pulitzer Hall on April 18 for the announcement of this year’s Pulitzer Prize winners. The students will write about the experience for their school newspapers.

Other events that NLP educators and students will attend include:

• “Living the Pulitzer Legacy” at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York on April 6, featuring Pulitzer Prize winners Larry C. Price, David Rohde and Paul Salopek, each of whom was honored for international reporting. Rohde, who won his Pulitzer at The Christian Science Monitor, is an NLP journalist fellow.
• “Pulitzer-Prize Winning Photographers and Their Images” at The New School in New York on May 10. The event will be hosted by the Eddie Adams Workshop. Adams won a Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography in 1969 for an image he captured while covering the Vietnam War for the Associated Press.
• An event focusing on the Public Service prize at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in Chicago on May 6.
• “War, Migration and the Quest for Peace” at the Ebell Theater in Los Angeles on May 19 and 20, hosted by the Los Angeles Times and the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

NLP has had Pulitzer connections from the beginning.

Alan C. Miller, NLP’s president and founder, won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2003 as an investigative reporter with the Los Angeles Times. He joined more than 300 fellow Pulitzer winners, the largest such gathering ever assembled, on Jan. 29 at the Newseum in Washington for the kickoff of the centennial celebration.

John Carroll, a founding member of NLP’s board and its chair for four years, served on the Pulitzer board from 1994 to 2003 and was its chairman in 2002. He edited three newspapers that won numerous Pulitzers — including the Los Angeles Times, which won 13 in his five years as editor. Carroll’s father, John Wallace Carroll, also served on the Pulitzer board.

In addition to Rohde, NLP journalist fellows who have won Pulitzer Prizes include Don Bartletti, a former photojournalist with the Los Angeles Times; Matt Wuerker, a political cartoonist with Politico; columnists Lisa Falkenberg of the Houston Chronicle and Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune; and investigative reporters Andrea Elliott, Kevin Sack and Deborah Sontag (The New York Times), James Grimaldi (The Wall Street Journal), Michael Moss (formerly with The New York Times) and David Willman (the Los Angeles Times).

In addition, one of NLP’s earliest supporters was David Moore, whose grandfather, Joseph Pulitzer, bequeathed the funds that established the Pulitzer Prizes in 1917. The David and Katherine Moore Family Foundation has provided grants to NLP every year since 2009.