The Invisible Institute, “a nonprofit journalism production company on the South Side of Chicago” has won two Pulitzer prizes.
The team behind You Didn’t See Nothin – Yohance Lacour, Sarah Geis, Erisa Apantaku, Dana Brozost-Kelleher, Bill Healy, and Alison Flowers, with editorial support from Jamie Kalven – won the Pulitzer Prize for Audio Reporting. And trina reynolds-tyler and Sarah Conway of City Bureau were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting for their series Missing in Chicago, the institute website said.
“Missing in Chickago” a collaboration between City Bureau, a non-profit civic media organisation, and Invisible Institute is a seven-part investigative series focussed on how police mishandling of missing person reports disproportionately impacts Black women and girls, Chicago Tribune reports.
“You Didn’t See Nothin” is a series about the 1997 hate crime committed against 13-year-old Lenard Clark, a Black youth severely beaten by a group of white Bridgeport teens.
The Pulitzer committee called it a powerful podcast an a “fluid amalgam of memoir, community history and journalism” revisiting a racially charged Chicago hate crime that continues to resonate nearly three decades later.
The Invisible Institute focuses on human rights reporting, and what sets it apart, according to executive director Andrew Fan, is that it works with people outside journalism. The relationships the institute has across Chicago are central to its reporting, he said.
According to Poynter, on Monday, roughly two dozen people from Invisible Institute and City Bureau crammed into the institute’s “tiny little office” to watch the Pulitzer Prize announcements, Fan said. Hearing that the institute won two Pulitzers was “shocking.”