As we look back on a year that was exceptionally dark, and brace ourselves for a 2024 that many fear will be bleaker still, it’s a pleasure to share that our work in 2023 included a report by The Christian Science Monitor that Apple News picked as the best “feel-good” story of the year.
The Climate Generation featured in-depth portraits of young activists from across the globe, each inspiring in their determination to forge a better future, from the northernmost Indigenous community in Canada and the flood-prone streets of Dhaka, Bangladesh, to communities in Montana where young people sued for the right to a more stable climate—and won.
The journalist who wrote the “feel-good” Montana story, Stephanie Hanes, is the recipient of multiple Pulitzer Center grants and for more than a decade our lead in the for-credit journalism course with our Campus Consortium partner William & Mary. Before all that, Stephanie was an intern in the Washington bureau of the St. Louis Post–Dispatch, the newspaper where all three of us got our first exposure to Pulitzer-style journalism.
That Pulitzer Center-style journalism was evident in the projects we supported in 2023, from exposés of gang-style corruption in Serbia and underreported violence in Ethiopia to the unspeakable brutality of a self-styled “goon squad” in a Mississippi sheriff’s department and the health impacts of plastic chemicals in the Global South. Reporting by our grantees was featured in The New York Times, Native News Online, Le Monde, PennLive, Repórter Brasil—and in the 38 video reports we funded for PBS NewsHour, on topics ranging from the war in Ukraine and floods in Pakistan to the crises in rural health and nursing in the United States.
Our colleagues and grantees shared the Pulitzer Center approach in K-12 classrooms, college campuses, and journalism conferences around the world, from São Paulo and Perugia to Stockholm, Johannesburg, Birmingham, Alabama, and Abu Dhabi.
More highlights below, and meanwhile, exciting changes to the website that feature our new strategic framework, one that champions the power of stories to make complex issues relevant and inspire action. You’ll see that we’re emphasizing five broad focus areas—human rights, global health, environment, peace and conflict, and information and artificial intelligence. In each of these focus areas, we’re combining collaborative enterprise journalism with communities of learning and audience-centered engagement.
With Pulitzer Center staff now based in 14 countries, collaboration across borders is easier than ever, and so, too, your opportunities to engage with our work, as journalists and educators and as donors, readers, and active citizens. Here’s to making constructive engagement with issues that matter the “feel-good” story of 2024.
Emily Rauh Pulitzer, Board Chair
Jon Sawyer, CEO and President
Above: Image by Hugh Kinsella Cunningham. Democratic Republic of Congo, 2022.
Video by Daniel Vasta. 2024.
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