Alumnus wins Pulitzer Prize
John Sullivan ’93, a reporter formerly at the Philadelphia Inquirer who now teaches at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, was on a team that won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service reporting.
Sullivan was one of five reporters who investigated violence in Philadelphia’s schools. The complete project, called “Assault on Learning” is available online.
The team analyzed 30,000 reports of violence and spent a year reporting the series. A summary of the series and an explanation of how it was reported is on Philly.com, the Inquirer‘s website.
Sullivan, who majored in politics and philosophy and minored in classics, wasn’t thinking about becoming a journalist when he was at Cornell, but, he said, the lessons he learned in class served him well.
He said classes with professors like Dave Loebsack, emeritus professor of politics and now a U.S. Congressman, Rob Sutherland, professor of politics, and William Carroll, a former professor of history, taught him not just about the nuts and bolts of how government works, but also how to ask the larger questions about why things are done the way they are.
“Cornell was a great place for me,” he said. “I still think about what I learned from my professors.”
After graduation, Sullivan became interested in journalism through his brother, who was a reporter. He went to graduate school at the University of Missouri and got a job at the News and Observer in Raleigh, N.C. After that, he moved to the Inquirer, where he served as an embedded reporter in Iraq, covered Gov. Ed Rendell and Philadelphia’s city government, and wrote for the paper’s science desk.
In 2009 articles he and two others wrote about how the Bush administration’s political interests made the Environmental Protection Agency less effective were finalists for a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. He also was on a team that won the 2007 Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism for stories about the Philadelphia Department of Human Services that resulted in a major restructuring of the department and, Sullivan believes, likely saved the lives of some children.
Sullivan and four others spent a year reporting and writing about the way Philadelphia schools handle—or mishandle—violence and what can be done to make schools safer. The series ran in March 2011.
In July 2011 Sullivan joined the faculty at the Medill School of Journalism. He’s the assistant director of Medill Watchdog, an initiative where students write public interest news stories.
A previous Cornell College alumnus who won a Pulitzer Prize was Donald Fehrenbacher ’44, who won the 1979 prize in history for his book on the Dred Scott decision.
