Paula Routly: Seven Days' Pulitzer Connections

From top: Joe Sexton, Ken Ellingwood and Andrea Suozzo Credit: Courtesy of Paula Routly | Pranish Pradhan | Andrea Suozzo

Every reporter — and publisher! — with an ounce of ambition has dreamed of winning a Pulitzer Prize, the highest recognition of achievement in U.S. journalism. But there’s no special treatment for small media outlets in this national competition. Writing quality aside, the subject matter has to meet a standard of gravitas — a natural disaster, revelation or surprise — that transcends geography. The judges also factor in the impact of the reporting. Did shining a light on the problem make a significant and measurable difference? For how many people?

Vermont scored a rare win in 2001, when Middlebury writer David Moats brought home a Pulitzer for his editorials in the Rutland Herald and Barre Montpelier Times-Argus advocating for the legalization of civil unions. (Coincidentally, he’s among the signers of a letter to the editor in this week’s issue.)

I wished the same for Williston-based Joe Sexton, one of three finalists for a 2025 Pulitzer Prize in the “Feature Writing” category. Over the past two years, Joe has written four powerful cover stories for Seven Days, starting with “The Loss of Grace,” his October 2023 exposé of child abuse at the Woodside Juvenile Rehabilitation Center. A former reporter and editor at both the New York Times and ProPublica, he also gave Vermont readers “The Straw Man,” an illustration of the state’s guns-for-drugs trade; “Acts of the Apostles,” about a Barre church that ministers to the addicted; and, most recently, “Year of the Dogs,” an inside account of how the University of Vermont men’s soccer team defied the odds to become NCAA champions.

None of those stories made the Pulitzer finalist list. But another one of his recent long-form works, “The Hardest Case for Mercy,” did: On Monday, May 5, at 3 p.m. I tuned in to the live-stream announcement of this year’s winners from Columbia University’s famed journalism school and listened to a voice summarize the trio of contenders in each of the 15 competition categories. Commissioned by the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news org that funds reporting on the U.S. criminal justice system, Joe’s “saga of moral complexity, constitutional law and shattering trauma” about administering justice in the case of the Parkland, Fla., high school shooter lost to a “sensitive portrait” in Esquire “of a Baptist pastor and small-town mayor who died by suicide.”

Joe, who has already been involved in six Pulitzer Prize-winning group projects, captured the moment in an emailed screenshot with the subject line: “Not a bad near miss.” Dogged and indefatigable, he’ll never give up. They should give an award for that!

Another member of the Seven Days editorial team was working behind the scenes this winter to identify America’s best journalism. Contributing editor and writing coach Ken Ellingwood was invited to be a nominating juror for the Pulitzers. He couldn’t reveal until it was over that he had been assessing work in the popular and very competitive “Local Reporting” category. The volunteer job required reading more than 120 submissions, many of which involved multiple stories and elements.

Ken’s committee forwarded its top picks to the Pulitzer Prize Board, which awarded the top honor to the Baltimore Banner and the New York Times for an investigative series on Baltimore’s “fentanyl crisis and its disproportionate impact on older Black men”; the entry included a database shared with other media outlets. Ken and his fellow jurors get credit at the bottom of that web page. Judging is a two-year commitment, so he’ll be back in the mix in 2026.

Another Pulitzer-related boast: Data journalist Andrea Suozzo, who left Seven Days in early 2021 to become a news apps developer at ProPublica, contributed data reporting to the “urgent” pieces on post-Roe v. Wade women’s health that earned her current employer the top award for public service. Although she wasn’t one of the published authors on the winning “Life of the Mother” series, in a press release, the org listed her among the “ProPublicans” who helped to elevate the project.

Good reporting is hard and humbling. The Oscars of journalism, the Pulitzer Prizes are as glamorous as it gets. Even if Seven Days never wins one, this annual selection is jaw-dropping proof of what’s possible.

Now back to work.