Best Newspaper Writing 2001

Tom Hallman's four-part narrative series in The Oregonian is the story of the remarkable boy behind a grotesque deformity that distorts his face & head. Hallman goes behind the mask to reveal Sam's profoundly normal self, his family's love, the passionate care of doctors, the miracles & limits of medicine, & the small cruelties of strangers that define true ugliness. Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. Steven Erlanger of The New York Times knew enough about the shifting politics of Yugoslavia that he recognized the first signs of Slobodan Milosevic's demise. His insight-rich deadline reporting is wrapped in a package of learned context & punctuated by quotes that ground the stories solidly in a Serbian mine or the streets of Belgrade. The staff of The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., sent almost two dozen reporters to cover the Seton Hall dormitory fire. The team produced highly focused, meaningful stories that combine an emphasis on teamwork, great attention to the details of human loss, & a clear appreciation for what that loss meant to its community, Leonard Pitts's columns for The Miami Herald cover the broad landscape of the human experience, but nowhere is his passion, wit, & sense of irony more pronounced than when he's writing about race relations. His winning columns take current events, wrestle them into a historical context, then turn them just so, surprising the reader & shining a new, insightful light on the matter. Stephen Henderson of the Baltimore Sun employs the conversational tone of the columnist, the curiosity of the beat reporter, & the narrative arc of creative non-fiction to give his editorials a distinct signature. Whether he brings those tools to bear on Baltimore's schools, it's crime problems, or a tribute to a unique developer, there's no question where his editorials stand or, for that matter, who wrote them. Stephen Magagnini of The Sacramento Bee tells the story of the stranglehold crime, cultural alienation & a widening generation gap have had on the dislocated Hmong people. Magagnini's mastery of the subject shows as he lays out values, habits & hopes that make Hmong culture distinct, while telling a universal story of the torturous battle between assimilation & cultural survival.Woods, Keith is the author of 'Best Newspaper Writing 2001' with ISBN 9781566251662 and ISBN 1566251664.