I doubt that anyone who worked at The Stranger in the ’90s or the ’00s would ever guess that one year we’d win a Pulitzer Prize. After all, The Stranger launched “santorum” into the universe (sorry if you got any on you), and one of the requirements for Pulitzer entries is that the material has to have been published in a newspaper “that adheres to the highest journalistic principles.” And by “highest,” I don’t think they meant newspapers where you sometimes get high with your boss at the office Christmas party.
But we’ve had so many good feature writers on staff over the years that maybe it isn’t so surprising. As the editor in chief, I was miffed when Brendan Kiley didn’t get any recognition for his investigative series “The Mystery of the Tainted Cocaine,” which I nominated for a Pulitzer in 2011 in three different categories.
In 2012, the Pulitzer Prizes were announced at noon on a Monday. That morning, walking to work, I thought: “If we’d won anything, they would have told us by now.” One of the pieces we’d nominated that year was “The Bravest Woman in Seattle,” a masterful piece of long-form narrative journalism by Eli Sanders about testimony in a heartbreaking murder trial.
