Pulitzer Center Update January 30, 2026
Annual Report 2025: See How the Pulitzer Center Inspires and Informs
The Pulitzer Center’s 2025 annual report is proof of journalism’s vital role in shaping our society and our future.
Journalism changes harmful practices—see the project Investigating the Global Shark Trade in our Environment section.
It exposes system failures—our Human Rights investigations demonstrate how negligence enables abusers, from high-ranking military officers to predators on dating apps, to escape accountability.
It illuminates the world—from the painful realities of war in Sudan to scientists’ race to stop antibiotic-resistant superbugs.
The kind of journalism the Pulitzer Center makes possible—what we call breakthrough journalism—also inspires curiosity, conversation, and purpose, especially when connected to schools and communities in creative ways.
In 2025, entries in our student poetry and letter-writing contests broke records, demonstrating journalism’s potential to empower youth voices and civic engagement. We transformed a multimedia project on the vanishing Thai mackerel into a traveling exhibition, I Miss You … Pla Tu, merging art and journalism to engage audiences across Southeast Asia who might otherwise never have seen the stories in the South China Morning Post.
From the United Nations climate conference to a convening of global health researchers, our panels and workshops ensured that accountability journalism informed the conversation. Our AI Spotlight training curriculum, now open-sourced and accessible to anyone, is equipping a growing community of journalists to report on AI’s profound influence on our world.
This report celebrates not only the accomplishments of one year, but marks a major milestone: This month, the Pulitzer Center turns 20 years old.
Belief in the power of journalism plus engagement has fueled the Center since its beginnings in 2006, and it will chart our course for the next two decades.
We are deeply proud of the way our resources for journalists—the grants, fellowships, toolkits, and trainings—fuse with our education and public outreach programs to deliver long-lasting impact. Thank you to our many partners and donors who make this powerful work possible. And thank you to our journalist grantees, whose commitment to the pursuit of truth inspires us all.
In these times of unprecedented change and challenges, we are excited about what’s ahead in 2026, and we can’t wait to tell you about it.
And now, we want to hear from you! Help us inform the work we do this year and beyond.
This message appeared in the January 30, 2026, edition of the Pulitzer Center's weekly newsletter. Subscribe today.
