The Philadelphia Inquirer won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its extensive reporting last year on violence in that city’s 146,000-student district. Through incident reports, public records, and hundreds of interviews, the Inquirer team found that dozens of serious crimes had taken place on a daily basis from 2007 to 2011. The seven-part series was the only education-related project that won a Pulitzer this year.
The reporters’ findings were “later corroborated by a Philadelphia school district blue-ribbon panel on safety, spurred an overhaul of incident reporting in the district, and prompted the hiring of a state-funded safe-schools advocate,” the paper reported.
