The Pulitzer Prize for breaking news tends to go to a massive team effort, often one in which a dozen or more reporters feed material to one, two or even three writers, who pull together the main story. Papers like The New York Times and L.A. Times used to call this the “swarm” approach to [...]
Tag Archives: Columbia University
Amy Ellis Nutt on writing a Pulitzer-winning story: tell “readers something they don’t know”
May 20, 2011 – 1:26 pm
The Star-Ledger’s Amy Ellis Nutt won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for feature writing with “The Wreck of the Lady Mary,” her five-chapter story on the sinking of a scallop boat off the coast of New Jersey. An adjunct instructor with Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and a former Nieman fellow, Nutt has long been devoted [...]
Eliza Griswold on religion, violence and reporting
May 3, 2011 – 8:50 am
We spoke last week with Eliza Griswold, winner of the 2011 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for “The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam.” In addition to winning the Lukas Prize, which is co-administered by Columbia University and the Nieman Foundation, Griswold has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The [...]
Isabel Wilkerson on the Great Migration, structuring an epic narrative and the challenges of writing nonfiction
April 4, 2011 – 11:10 am
Continuing the spring flurry of awards, Columbia University and the Nieman Foundation announced last week that the 2011 Mark Lynton History Prize will be awarded to Isabel Wilkerson for her book “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.” Currently the director of narrative nonfiction at Boston University’s College of Communication, [...]
David Finkel on The Good Soldiers: “I’m not obligated to these men, but I do want to tell a story that they recognize”
May 3, 2010 – 4:35 pm
Tomorrow, Washington Post national enterprise editor David Finkel will receive the 2010 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for The Good Soldiers, a bruising account of a U.S. Army battalion’s service in Iraq during 2007 and 2008. The $10,000 prize, announced by the Nieman Foundation and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, is given for excellence [...]
