Small-town editor who won Pulitzer, other awards for prison editorials scores again with a Sigma Delta Chi award

The editorial started on a front page dominated by coverage of the pandemic.

Jeff Gerritt

Jeff Gerritt, the small-town editor who won a Pulitzer Prize last year for editorial writing, is this year's winner of the Sigma Delta Chi Award for editorial writing in newspapers of 100,000 or less circulation.

The award, presented by the Society of Professional Journalists, honors Gerritt's April 28, 2020, editorial calling for mass testing of Texas prisoners for the coronavirus. He wrote it for the Palestine Herald-Press, which serves Anderson County, the site of five state prisons.

"Texas prisons, as those in most states, rest largely in rural areas," Gerritt noted a little over than a month and a half into the pandemic. "In Anderson County, local prisons have become the largest catalysts for Covid-19. Prison employees make up 13 of Anderson County's 20 confirmed cases . . . In truth, hundreds of people in this county may have the virus, with most cases coming, directly or indirectly, from local prisons."

Gerritt further localized the issue: "Treating a pandemic without comprehensive testing is like taking a trip without a road map, Palestine physician Carolyn Salter told the Herald-Press editorial page. 'In any institution without freedom of movement, everyone should be tested,' she said."

A week after the editorial ran, Gerritt won the Pulitzer " "for editorials that exposed how pre-trial inmates died horrific deaths in a small Texas county jail—reflecting a rising trend across the state—and courageously took on the local sheriff and judicial establishment, which tried to cover up these needless tragedies," the judges said. Earlier in the day, Gerritt won the News Leaders Association’s Burl Osborne Award for Editorial Leadership in small markets, and that was on top of the 2020 National Headliner Award for editorial writing.

Soon afterward, Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. named Gerritt editor of the Sharon Herald and New Castle News in western Pennsylvania. There, he has started a podcast called New Generation, "for those who desire a new way of gaining information rather than reading a traditional newspaper," with "everything from sports, pop culture, politics, and local news." In the latest episode, he discusses his three-part editorial advocating abolition of the death penalty, with a local couple explaining why they opposed it for their daughter's murder.

Other awards: In upstate New York, North Country Public Radio won the award for public service journalism in small markets for its report on the challenges of child care during the pandemic. Searchlight New Mexico won the Covid-19 newspaper feature reporting award for its report on the pandemic's impact on five New Mexican towns.