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Today, The Texas Tribune was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for the first time in its history, alongside our partners ProPublica and FRONTLINE, in the category of explanatory reporting.
The three organizations were recognized for our work investigating the failed law enforcement response to the 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, which took the lives of 19 students and 2 educators. Our coverage showed how officers feared the shooter’s AR-15, how more mass active shooter training is required of children than law enforcement, how there’s a lack of standardization of police reports on such shootings and how Texas has failed to pass meaningful gun control laws despite several mass shootings here. This coverage also included a FRONTLINE film, “Inside the Uvalde Response.”
The Tribune obtained a massive trove of files that included confidential interviews with state and local law enforcement officers who were interviewed in the aftermath of the tragedy about their experiences, assumptions and fears that day. We understood that the Uvalde shooting response was not primarily a failure because of one or two officers, but rather because of a collection of errors in judgment and action.
The U.S. Department of Justice, in a comprehensive report released in January 2024, found that “cascading failures of leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy and training” led to the bungled response. “Had law enforcement agencies followed generally accepted practices in an active shooter situation and gone right after the shooter to stop him, lives would have been saved and people would have survived,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in releasing the report.
Long after most camera crews left Uvalde, the Tribune stayed on the story, joined by members of our ProPublica-Texas Tribune investigative unit and then by FRONTLINE journalists.
While news organizations, including our own, had previously revealed facets of the failure, many questions remained about the extent of the failures and whether they pointed to larger systemic problems rather than individual mistakes. Our unique collaboration offered an exhaustive account of the entire scope of the response.
Earlier this year, this collaboration was recognized with a National Magazine Award for reporting and the Collier Prize for State Government Accountability.
While we are grateful for this incredibly special recognition, we acknowledge this was one of the most emotionally difficult stories any of us had ever covered. We appreciate the work of the Dart Center on Trauma and Journalism at Columbia Journalism School with helping our staff to cover this tragedy with care for our subjects and sources and care for the journalists involved. We are grateful to the survivors and relatives of victims in Uvalde, who entrusted us with their stories. We hope that our work might better inform and prepare law enforcement agencies that have the difficult task of training officers to react to mass shootings.
Since 1917, the Pulitzer Prizes have recognized excellence in journalism and the arts. The prizes are awarded by Columbia University on the recommendations of the Pulitzer board. (The Tribune’s editor in chief, Sewell Chan, joined the board in 2022 but was recused from this category.)
The Pulitzer for explanatory reporting, awarded since 1998, recognizes work “that illuminates a significant and complex subject, demonstrating mastery of the subject, lucid writing and clear presentation, using any available journalistic tool.”
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