Pulitzer Center Update October 10, 2025
The Future of Journalism Could Start Here
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Washington Weekend Welcomes Emerging Journalists to D.C.
As this email hits your inbox, 40-plus Pulitzer Center Campus Consortium Reporting Fellows are traveling via plane, train, and automobile to our Washington Weekend conference. This annual gathering brings our cohort of student journalists face to face for the first time since their selection into the Fellowship in June 2025.
This is my sixth Washington Weekend with the Pulitzer Center. Our Fellows’ assignment remains the same every year: Produce a journalism project on an underreported issue. But I continue to be astounded by the urgency and freshness of the stories reported by each cohort.
Many of their projects are still wrapping up, but some are already available to read on our website. Boston University’s Shandra Back reported for The Guardian on immigration raids in sugarcane fields in the Dominican Republic, formerly seen as safe zones for Haitian migrant workers. Nicole J. Caruth, a Mental Well-Being Fellow from the University of California, Berkeley, shared a tale of cultivated community at an LGBTQ+-led farm in Texas for Civil Eats.
Lilly Molina, of Elon University, spent part of her summer returning to Costa Rica to report on illegal fishing of vulnerable hammerhead sharks. “To say that I pushed myself outside my comfort zone on this trip would be an understatement,” Molina reflected in a recent Field Note. “I know what I experienced in Costa Rica is unique to only me, thanks to the Pulitzer Center. No one can take this experience away from me.”
I’m certain that, come Sunday, this group of Fellows will have enjoyed what I’ve come to know as my favorite Washington Weekend traditions: engaging in deep discussions on the future of journalism; exchanging laughs during shared meals; and forging connections that will last long after their time in the Pulitzer Center Reporting Fellowship has ended.
I’m excited to see these Reporting Fellows make the most of their time at Washington Weekend, and to bring you along with us as we continue to share their crucial journalism.
Take care,
Impact
Texas Public Radio reporter and StoryReach U.S. Fellow Paul Flahive received the first Collier Spotlight award—a quarterly certificate recognizing groundbreaking reporting on state government institutions—for his Pulitzer Center-supported investigation into the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services. The award includes a $500 honorarium.
Flahive’s project uncovered that more than 1,200 children died in Texas from maltreatment between 2018 and 2023. About half of the deaths blamed on abuse and neglect occurred in families that had already come under state scrutiny, and one of five of those deaths occurred in families that had already been investigated at least three times.
Produced as part of the Pulitzer Center’s StoryReach U.S. Fellowship, the investigation sheds light on systemic failures within Texas’ child welfare system.
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This message first appeared in the October 10, 2025, edition of the Pulitzer Center's weekly newsletter. Subscribe today.
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