Pulitzer-Winning Reporting

Emily Glazer

Musk Above the Law

Wall Street Journal enterprise reporter Emily Glazer ’10 led an 18-person team that won a Pulitzer Prize in national reporting for the article series Musk Above the Law. The series examined how Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk rose to power as an entrepreneurial and political force. “These stories are not for the faint of heart and forced me to develop an even thicker skin,” says Glazer. “There’s also a reason we have an 18-person team — one I’m so proud to lead. When you’re reporting on the world’s wealthiest person, whose power is soaring to unforeseen heights, you have to get the best person on every angle.” 

Raj Mankad

Dangerous Crossings 

Raj Mankad ’99, deputy opinion editor at the Houston Chronicle, won the Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing, alongside three of his colleagues, for Dangerous Crossings, a series of investigative articles, editorials and videos that explored how stalled freight trains routinely block Houston intersections for hours, delaying children en route to nearby schools. The team reported on children’s frequent attempts to climb under or squeeze between train cars to make it to school on time, including a fatal attempt by a high schooler to outrun an oncoming train. “We’d done years of research on this problem. That allowed us to respond quickly to that tragedy with emotion and evidence,” says Mankad. He acknowledges that Houston still has work to do to make the city safer. But Chicago, he says, can serve as a model. “Chicago had visionary leaders who worked over many years to separate freight rail from city streets … and that’s what we need to do in Houston.” 

Alissa Zhu

Baltimore’s Overdose Crisis 

A journalist for the Baltimore Banner, Alissa Zhu ’15 won the Pulitzer Prize in local reporting alongside photojournalist Jessica Gallagher and data specialist Nick Thieme for an article series on Baltimore’s overdose crisis and the multidimensional ways it has affected the city. “A deep dive on drug overdoses was one of the Banner’s first big story ideas,” says Zhu, whose win comes less than three years after the publication’s launch. “We sued to obtain data that had been kept from the public’s view and scoured the city for stories from mothers who have buried children, people struggling with addiction and frontline workers fighting to save lives every day. We are honored to see the information we brought to light helping shape new conversations, policies and programs to tackle the crisis in our city and state.”