A joint investigation between two Chicago newsrooms, including one that began as a volunteer-run startup less than 10 years ago, and a biography on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. by a local author have been awarded journalism’s highest honor.
City Bureau and Invisible Institute were awarded the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting on 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 seven-part investigation, which stemmed from Reynolds-Tyler’s work leading data science project Beneath the Surface that analyzed open missing persons 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 audio team — Yohance Lacour, Sarah Geis, Erisa Apantaku, Dana Brozost-Kelleher, Bill Healy and Alison Flowers, with editorial support from Jamie Kalven — also received a Pulitzer Prize in Audio Reporting with USG Audio for for the series “You Didn’t See Nothin.”
The series follows host Lacour, an ex-con, as he revisits a 1997 hate crime on the South Side that introduced him to investigative journalism, examining how its ripple effects have shaped his own life over the past quarter-century.
“I hope that the world sees what can happen when you give Black men a second chance and what can happen when you offer support and opportunity instead of imprisonment,” Lacour said. “We have a lot of talented minds behind those walls.”
Chicago author Jonathan Eig won in the Biography category for “King: A Life,” sharing honors with Ilyon Woo, author of “Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom.”
“The Pulitzer Prize is every journalist’s dream,” Eig told the Sun-Times. “You can do great work your whole career and deserve one and never get lucky enough to get one, so it’s an unbelievable honor.”
‘Missing in Chicago’ series sheds light on handling of missing persons cases
The two-year investigation looked into how Chicago police handle missing persons cases. Conway and Reynolds-Tyler found that Black Chicagoans make up about two-thirds of all missing persons cases in Chicago over the last 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 making up 2% of the city population as of 2020. The series also looked into the department’s recordkeeping — over 40% of records are missing critical data points.
“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.”
Reynolds-Tyler told the Sun-Times she spent a lot of time building relationships with sources who felt their stories weren’t accurately told by other journalists.
“We were really committed to telling a full story, not only focusing on the circumstance of the tragedy of their loved ones’ death or their loved ones missing, but also what came before and what came afterward. That was extremely important to us to paint the full picture,” she said.
One of the women interviewed in the series is Tammy Pittman. Her daughter, Shante Bohanan, called her sister on July 24, 2016, and said she had a “gun held to her head,” Reynolds-Tyler and Conway reported. Pittman tried to report Bohanan missing but said officers suggested Bohanan had run away and told Pittman to wait 24 hours before reporting her missing. Three days after her mother first tried to file a missing persons report, Bohanan’s naked body was found inside a black plastic garbage bag on 92nd Street in Burnside.
Pittman “had decided she was never going to talk to media again, and to have her kind of once again step into her power and be able to share her daughter’s story and talk about what has happened to her and how she’s still seeking justice for what has happened, it’s why we do journalism,” Conway told the Sun-Times.
Reynolds-Tyler said their reporting shows the power of community and the need for police accountability.
“We must think really critically about who is coming to the aid of survivors of violence and ways that law enforcement and policymakers can introduce accountability measures in the form of transparency so that families can actually know and take account for the work that is being done on their loved ones’ cases,” Reynolds-Tyler said.
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.
The Invisible Institute grew out of the work of executive director Jamie Kalven, who served as a consultant to public housing resident councils beginning in the mid-1990s. From 1994 until the final demolition in 2007, the Stateway Gardens public housing development, considered to be the single poorest community in the nation, according to the Census Bureau, was Kalven’s base of operations.
The Invisible Institute has collaborated for years with the Mandel Legal Aid Clinic of the University of Chicago Law School, which brought six federal civil rights suits on behalf on public housing residents and represented Kalven in Kalven v. Chicago in 2014 that led to a landmark decision establishing that in Illinois police misconduct files are public information.
Following the court ruling, the Invisible Institute incorporated as a nonprofit. Today Invisible Institute has “a team of just over a dozen journalists, but over the last four years, we have won three Pulitzer Prizes — each in different categories — and been a finalist for a fourth,” Executive Director Andrew Fan wrote in an email sent to subscribers.
“This year, we won for two very different projects — one an empathetic, thorough investigation of missing person cases that emerged out of a groundbreaking community-driven data exploration, the second a searing audio narrative that weaves together memoir and investigation. What connects both is our team’s deep groundedness in Chicago and our patience in seeing our work as a single ongoing inquiry, tracing its roots back to Jamie Kalven’s reporting from high-rise public housing,” Fan wrote.
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, said Ariel Cheung, editorial director of City Bureau. Conway and Reynolds-Tyler also testified before the Illinois Task Force on missing and murdered Chicago women. Last month, Mayor Brandon Johnson and nine alderpersons, most of whom are Black women, issued a resolution calling for a city task force on the issue.
The recognition for City Bureau, from being a small 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.
‘King: A Life’ recognized as ‘revelatory’
Chicago author Jonathan Eig won the 2024 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.
Eig, who has written six books, said he started working on “King” when he was working on his book about Muhammad Ali and found himself talking to people who knew King. That’s when he realized he had an opportunity to interview people who knew the civil rights leader but that the window was closing.
He also realized there hadn’t been a biography on King since the 1980s and there was a need for a “more intimate portrait, one that made him flesh and blood, and showed how brave and how radical he was.”
At the same time, Eig felt, “we needed to kick [King] off the pedestal a little bit and remind folks that he was a man, and that I think that makes him even more heroic.”
Contributing: Associated Press
