Ken Armstrong, NF ’01, and his colleague Michael Berens at The Seattle Times have won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting for “Methadone and the Politics of Pain.” The three-part series revealed how the state of Washington steered vulnerable Medicare patients away from relatively safe pain medication to methadone, a cheap but unpredictable painkiller linked to 2,173 fatal overdoses.
Reporters David Jackson, NF ’09, and Gary Marx of the Chicago Tribune were selected as finalists in the same category for “Fugitives from Justice,” which exposed a neglectful state justice system that allowed a number of dangerous criminals to evade trial for murder, rape and other violent felonies. Mary Schmich, NF ’96, also of the Chicago Tribune, won the Commentary Pulitzer “for her wide range of down-to-earth columns that reflect the character and capture the culture of her famed city.”