Photographs of Shantieya Smith are displayed in her mother Latonya Moore’s living room. Smith went missing in 2018 and was later found dead.
Sebastián Hidalgo for City Bureau
A joint investigation between two Chicago newsrooms, including one that began as a volunteer-run startup less than 10 years ago, has been awarded journalism’s highest honor.
City Bureau and Invisible Institute were awarded the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting Monday for the “Missing in Chicago” series by Sarah Conway, senior reporter at City Bureau, and Trina Reynolds-Tyler, data director at the Invisible Institute, the Pulitzer Prize Board announced Monday afternoon. The seven-part joint project, which stemmed from Reynolds-Tyler’s work leading data science project Beneath the Surface and analyzing open missing person cases in Chicago, was published in November. The other finalists in the Local Reporting category included Mississippi Today and The New York Times and staff of The Villages Daily Sun in Florida.
Invisible Institute’s Yohance Lacour, Sarah Geis, Erisa Apantaku, Dana Brozost-Kelleher, and Bill Healy, with editorial support from Alison Flowers and Jamie Kalven, also received a Pulitzer Prize in Audio Reporting with USG Audio for its series that revisited a Chicago hate crime from the 1990s, blending memoir, community history and journalism.
“When our reporting is informed by the lived experiences and needs of community, the potential for impact is boundless,” City Bureau Executive Director Morgan Malone said in a statement. “I look forward to the change brewing in Chicago and Illinois, due in large part to their incredible reporting, and in the journalism industry at large, as this Pulitzer is proof that investigative journalism driven by community is alive, well and a catalyst for the world we know to be possible.”
The two-year investigation looked into how Chicago police handle missing person cases and found the disproportionate impact on Black women and girls. Conway and Reynolds-Tyler found that the police department often tells families to wait 24-48 hours before reporting loved ones missing and that Black Chicagoans make up about two-thirds of all missing person cases in Chicago over the past two decades. In particular, Black girls and women between the ages of 10 and 20 make up about a third of all missing person cases in the city, according to police data, despite comprising only 2% of the city population as of 2020. The series also looked into the department’s record-keeping — over 40% of records are missing critical data points and missing persons reports are some of the last CPD reports still kept on paper.
Ariel Cheung, editorial director of City Bureau, said the recognition is “a total honor.”
“And we’re thrilled not just to be recognized for the work that’s gone into this, but for the opportunity to highlight this issue that has been so central to the lives of the people who are covered in the story and their experiences as family and loved ones of missing people in Chicago,” Cheung told the Sun-Times.
Since starting as an all-volunteer organization in 2015, City Bureau has launched programs such as its Civic Reporting Fellowship and national Documenters program that aimed to empower people with the tools and skills to engage in critical public conversations and produce information in response to people’s needs. In 2022, City Bureau received the Stronger Democracy Award for its work creating the Documenters Network, which trained local residents to cover public meetings in their communities; as one of three recipients, the organization garnered $10 million of the $22 million award. Today City Bureau has 27 employees, with five full-time journalists.
Since it was published in November, the series has prompted some action, including the Chicago inspector general’s office launching an official review of police accountability systems. Conway and Reynolds-Tyler also testified before the Illinois Task Force on missing and murdered Chicago women. At the end of April, Mayor Brandon Johnson and nine aldermen, most of whom are Black women, issued a resolution calling for a city task force on the issue.
From being a startup a few years ago to a Pulitzer Prize winning outlet in nine years shows how journalism can be informed and led by the community, Cheung said.
“This sort of recognition really cements the importance of the model that City Bureau functions around, which is that journalism can be done in different ways, that it can be a way to equip people with skills and resources. It can be done in a way that is informed by the community. That’s where the heart of the work comes from,” Cheung said.
Chicago author wins Pulitzer for King biography
Chicago author Jonathan Eig won the Pulitzer Prize in Biography for his book “King: A Life.” The book paints “a revelatory portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. that draws on new sources to enrich our understanding of each stage of the civil rights leader’s life, exploring his strengths and weaknesses, including the self-questioning and depression that accompanied his determination,” according to the Pulitzer board.