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Monday, April 10, 2017

Pulitzers go to Iowa twice-weekly for editorials on corporate agriculture, W.Va. daily for probe of drug makers' and governments' roles in opioid crisis

This item was updated and revised at 3:10, 4:05 and 4:40 p.m.

Tom Cullen, his father Art and Art's brother John, the paper's co-owner
Art Cullen, editor and co-owner of the Storm Lake Times, a twice-weekly newspaper in Iowa, won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2016 today. The Pulitzer board said Cullen's writing for the 3,000-circulation paper was "fueled by tenacious reporting, impressive expertise and engaging writing that successfully challenged powerful corporate agricultural interests in Iowa." The paper has written extensively about the pollution of the Raccoon River by farmers and Big Ag's paying for the county's defense of a lawsuit filed by the Des Moines Water Works.

Eric Eyre of the Charleston Gazette-Mail won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting for revealing the role of the pharmaceutical industry and the fecklessness of government officials in the opioid-abuse crisis in West Virginia. His work also won the Scripps Howard Foundation First Amendment award and was cited by the Selden Ring Award judges at the University of Southern California Annenberg School.

A runner-up in the investigative category was Steve Reilly of the USA Today Network for his "far-reaching investigation that used two ambitious data-gathering efforts to turn up 9,000 teachers across the nation who should have been flagged for past disciplinary offenses but were not," as the Pulitzer board put it.

Stories with rural angles have been honored with other awards this year. Alec MacGillis of ProPublica won the national-reporting prize in Long Island University’s George Polk Awards for his story identifying "trends among voters in Rust Belt states that 'the political establishment ignored, dismissed or overlooked', according to the Polks," Roy J. Harris Jr. reports for the Poynter Institute. "In addition, the Scripps Howard Foundation’s awards, which were announced in early March, honored MacGillis’s work with an award titled the 'Topic of the Year'."


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