The St. Petersburg Times’ Lane DeGregory, who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing yesterday, is an alumna of the Daily Progress, Bob Gibson writes on Facebook. DeGregory won for “The Girl in the Window,” which the judges describe as a “moving, richly detailed story of a neglected little girl, found in a roach-infested room, unable to talk or feed herself, who was adopted by a new family committed to her nurturing.”
The paper won a second Pulitzer yesterday, for their popular Truth-O-Meter website, which evaluates the accuracy of claims made by political leaders. The nationally-respected paper has racked up eight Pulitzers since 1964, surely in part because they are owned and operated by a non-profit journalism school, The Poynter Institute. And though there’s no Pulitzer in it, I highly recommend wasting some time on their their Tampa Bay Mug Shots website. I like to use it to play a game I call “Guess the Crime,” based on the photos.
Ms. DeGregory is also a U.Va. grad, and get her start at the Cavalier Daily.
she was the editor of the cav daily (halfway down this link http://tinyurl.com/cd7ocv)
You’re right, of course—thanks for pointing that out, folks.
How did Gibson discover that something involving the Prog was on Facebook, and how did Waldo discover Bob commented on it? Do you guys have search staffs for that?
Well, Bob presumably read the listing of winners, and spotted his former coworker. He wrote about it on Facebook, which my wife and I saw via our Facebook accounts. That’s how I learned that a former DP employee had won, which is how I came to write about it here.
But I adore the idea of having a “search staff,” rather than the reality of me spending five minutes a day on this website. :)
It’s worth noting that one of the features finalists also has Charlottesville connections — John Barry, also of the St. Pete Times, was a finalist for his story about an injured dolphin. John’s daughter Sarah graduated from UVA, reported for the Progress for awhile and now writes for SNL Financial. It’s a small world.
I’d recommend the Pulitzer site to anyone who’s looking for some good nonfiction reading material, particularly the features section. I suspect it’s often overlooked among non-journalists. I’d probably rate the 1998 features winner, “Angels and Demons,” by Thomas French of (guess where) the St. Petersburg Times, as the best nonfiction piece I’ve ever read. It’s also long enough to be a book, and sadly, in these days of budget cuts and dwindling circulations at newspapers, I think those stories are a thing of the past.