When the Pulitzer Prize Board announced its 2026 winners, three honored projects shared something beyond excellence. None could have been done alone — and none without reporters building trust, face to face with the communities they covered.
Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism: San Francisco Chronicle’s ‘Burned’
The project that became “Burned” began in early October 2024 when investigative reporter Susie Neilson read a story about hurricane survivors being underpaid by their insurers. She wondered whether fire survivors faced the same issue.
“I walked over to Megan’s desk,” Neilson said, “and I was like, ‘Megan, have you ever heard of similar insurance issues happening with fire survivors?’” The Chronicle had hired Megan Fan Munce a year earlier to cover property insurance full time. Neilson said it was that expertise that “made this story possible.”
Within a day or two, Fan Munce surfaced a database of market conduct examinations from the California Insurance Department that detailed reviewed insurance practices. The two spent a full day on newsroom couches reading dense files. Their findings were turning up evidence of a system wide algorithm that seemed to be contributing to homeowners being under-insured and state regulators not flagging it for policy review.
“There had never been a broader reckoning within the industry of what’s causing this widespread underinsurance,” Neilson said. “That’s how this project began — us getting under the hood of the algorithm.”
Ryan Gabrielson joined the Chronicle as investigative editor in December of 2024, arriving from ProPublica. He said he arrived with an email in his inbox that included a reporting memo from Neilson and Fan Munce, which already had the makings of a great investigation. “They already had a central finding — that there is a system that insurers use to basically lowball rebuild costs and build that into these policies,” said Gabrielson.
Then Los Angeles began to burn. The Eaton and Palisades fires tore through Los Angeles County that January, becoming the most devastating fires in the state’s history.
“The LA wildfires completely altered the course of our investigation,” Neilson said.
Neilson and Fan Munce traveled to fire zones. Fan Munce secured access to a Discord server used by thousands of fire survivors, giving the team a real-time window into insurance claims. “Thanks to Megan, we were able to really early on get a finger on the pulse of what thousands, literally thousands of fire survivors were talking about with their insurance claims,” Neilson said. “That guided our reporting for the next nine months.”
As the reporting expanded, Gabrielson said the team needed a third reporter. The Chronicle had just hired Sara DiNatale from the San Antonio Express-News, where she had won a 2024 George Polk Award for an investigation into the Texas solar industry. Her experience in consumer accountability reporting aligned with a new thread the team was pursuing: a state task force on smoke damage cleanup standards that survivors said was largely populated by insurance industry representatives.
Getting her reassigned required approval from the editor in chief and politics editor Sarah Libby. What followed was what Nielsen described as a “hive mind” kind of collaboration, for which the reporters were sharing notes, conducting interviews together and tracking each other’s findings so closely that bylines overlapped.
Fan Munce said the team’s mix of backgrounds — Neilson’s investigative work, her insurance expertise, DiNatale’s government accountability reporting — was central. “This would have been a very different series if it hadn't had that level of diversity in background and reporting experience,” she said.
Neilson traced the collaboration’s success to something harder to engineer. “This collaborative model approach to investigative reporting is becoming the new norm,” she said. “It used to be that it was this one man, usually, or pair of men, that would approach a story and be really competitive. I feel like the lack of ego is what made this all possible.”
The impact has been ongoing. Five bills informed by the series have taken shape in the California legislature. The team keeps track of them as well as some of the homeowners they met during their reporting. When they reconnected with Los Angeles sources after the Pulitzer announcement, many who had not yet returned home when the series ended were finally back.
Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography: The Washington Post’s ‘Tanner’s Song’
The Washington Post photographer Jahi Chikwendiu spent 24 and a half years at the paper. His final assignment was a photo essay on Tanner Martin, a 30-year-old man living with stage 4 colon cancer while his wife, Shay, prepared to give birth to their first child.
Chikwendiu was assigned the project by photo editor Maya Valentine to work with the paper’s national reporter Ariana Eunjung Cha as part of a series on rising cancer rates among young people.
“It’s a sensitive topic,” he said. “It means something to be trusted to do this.”
In his interview with E&P, Chikwendiu said there were multiple collaborations unfolding in multiple directions at once. With Cha, he said it became a practiced, almost wordless coordination that photojournalists value deeply.
“From day one, I could already tell that she’s seasoned,” he said. He described what he called a “photo dance,” in which a photographer moves through a space to blend into the background to find angles while a reporter avoids disrupting that flow.
Cha, in an email exchange, told E&P working with Chikwendiu opened up new avenues for learning about the people at the heart of a story.
“Conversations with him almost always produced a new idea, a better question or a different way of seeing the story,” Cha said.
But the collaboration he said was most critical was the one with Tanner Martin and Shay Martin and their family. He first visited without cameras, listening before photographing, then gradually faded into the background as trust took hold. “Most of the time I’m trying to fade, I’m trying to ultimately fade back," he said, “so I can get them live like I’m not there.”
From the beginning, he said he was deliberate about framing. "Everybody was talking about him dying of cancer, him dying, him dying, him dying,” he said. “And my approach to things like this is to show him living.”
What he found in Tanner Martin, even in the final months through treatment and pain management, was the man’s humor, warmth and a steadiness others consistently recognized — whether he was fully awake or fading in and out. “He was a good dude,” Chikwendiu said. “The way these people described him, the vibes he was giving off, everyone felt it.”
Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting: Connecticut Mirror’s and ProPublica’s ‘On the Hook’
The story that became “On the Hook” came to the small nonprofit newsroom through two reporters. Veteran Investigative Reporter Dave Altimari received a tip from inside the Department of Motor Vehicles. And Ginny Monk, who was covering housing and poverty for the Connecticut Mirror, began hearing complaints from tenants in neighborhoods she covered, about cars being towed from low-income apartment complexes.
“We heard each other talking about it in the newsroom,” Monk said, “and we’re like, should we work on this together? Probably.”
The collaboration that followed took more than two years, generated more than 10,000 records, and required Monk and Altimari to track down more than 100 people whose cars had been towed, often through door-to-door outreach. The reporting uncovered a corrupt system involving the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles and bad actors preying on some of Connecticut’s poorest residents.
Key to the project’s development was collaboration with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, said Connecticut Mirror Executive Editor Elizabeth Hamilton. “We suspected that the project would be challenging for our newsroom to pull off given the amount of data we were seeking from the state, and that turned out to be true.”
ProPublica brought more than a dozen people onto the project, including Senior Editor Michael Grabell and data reporters Sophie Chou and Haru Coryne. They helped process and analyze public records obtained by Monk and Altimari, converting more than 10,000 scanned, often handwritten forms into a structured, searchable database.
Grabell said the shoe-leather reporting by Monk and Altimari was inseparable from the data work: “You don't understand a data set until you find the example in real life that’s in the data.”
Altimari’s deep network of sources in the state was critical, said Hamilton and Grabell, helping the team uncover the names and identities of towing companies involved in a broader system of grift. Monk, who has a history of creative community outreach, strengthened sourcing on the ground by distributing flyers in neighborhoods and going door to door to find sources.
Both Grabell and Hamilton acted as editors, with the team meeting regularly on Zoom. The fact-checking process, a rigorous word-by-word verification of every claim, was essential, Hamilton said. “I’ve never slept so soundly before an investigative story ran than I did during the towing project.”
Monk echoed that sentiment and said the process fortified the reporting. “Those little decisions add up to big credibility.”
Grabell said he had worried the story might be easy for the Pulitzer committee to overlook. “In a year when so much was happening, to be able to break through on a story about towing,” he said. “I was glad the Pulitzer Committee could see through that and see the public service.”
The first story published in early January, and within 24 hours Connecticut’s DMV leadership announced a review of towing practices. A bill overhauling the state’s century-old towing statutes passed in May 2025 with near-unanimous bipartisan support, and a second bill passed both chambers around the time of the Pulitzer announcement.
Note: The prize for local reporting was awarded to two projects this year. The other went to the Chicago Tribune for its coverage of the federal militarized surge in the city and the community’s response and resistance.
Diane Sylvester is an award-winning 30-year multimedia news veteran. She works as a reporter, editor and newsroom strategist. She can be reached at diane.povcreative@gmail.com.
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