‘Post’ editors congratulate former Postie, Wesley Lowery, on Pulitzer Prize.
We weren’t entirely surprised Monday afternoon to hear that former Post editor-in-chief Wesley Lowery was part of the team of Washington Post reporters and editors who won a Pulitzer Prize.
Lowery’s career is still in its infancy, but it’s already been one defined by some of the most powerful and important reporting in the past few years. He was part of the Los Angeles Times’ coverage of the Christopher Dorner manhunt. He and other Boston Globe journalists contributed to that newspaper’s Pulitzer-winning reporting regarding 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and its aftermath. He was on the ground during protests and marches in Ferguson, Missouri.
The latest Pulitzer Prize, in national reporting, stems from Lowery’s role in the Washington Post’s creation of a database to track the number of people killed by police officers. Lowery and others’ reporting humanized that data by writing stories highlighting injustices, such as police officers’ inability to effectively communicate with mentally unstable individuals and a report that showed unarmed black men were seven times more likely to die by police gunfire than white men.
The Post wrote an article when Lowery and his Globe colleagues won the prize in 2014. At that time, Lowery told a Post reporter that he credited his time at The Post and Ohio University with giving him valuable experience in collaborative reporting.
At a time when many OU journalism students and Post reporters prepare to graduate, and high school students look ahead to enrolling at the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism next fall, we hope they keep Lowery’s work in mind.
It’s proof that, in a time where ‘newspaper reporter’ is considered the worst job of 2016, there still is room to produce powerful journalism.
Editorials represent the majority opinion of The Post's executive editors: Editor-in-Chief Emma Ockerman, Managing Editor Rebekah Barnes and Digital Managing Editor Samuel Howard. Post editorials are independent of the publication's news coverage.
