Story #65 Tiny newspaper in US wins Pulitzer prize for taking on big business
As the article states, a number of important local stories were leading the website of the Storm Lake Times, circulation 3,000, on Tuesday morning. Second-grader Alejandra Gonzales found a four-leaf clover in the field behind her school. A local woman had bought and renovated a building to house 25 elderly cats.
And in a modest announcement of just a sentence, another notable local happening: on Monday, Art Cullen, the paper’s owner and editor, was awarded a Pulitzer prize, the most prestigious award in global journalism, for his editorial writing. Fellow honorees for 2017 include the rather better read New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Miami Herald. The twice-weekly newspaper, serving a town of a little over 10,000 people, may not previously have been widely read outside Buena Vista county, north-west Iowa, but Cullen’s editorials – “fuelled by tenacious reporting, impressive expertise and engaging writing that successfully challenged powerful corporate agricultural interests in Iowa” – certainly caught the attention of the Pulitzer committee. He beat writers from the Washington Post and Houston Chronicle to the award.
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