Transcript for Local News Matters With Toluse Olorunnipa, Alissa Zhu & Jessica Gallagher

Episode details can be found here.

Transcript:

This is the Pulitzer on the Road podcast and I'm your guide, Nicole Carroll. I’m a co-chair of the Pulitzer Prize board and a faculty member at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

Each spring, 23 Pulitzer Prizes are awarded for distinguished journalism, books, drama and music.

The Pulitzer on the Road initiative launched in 2023 to celebrate the work of Pulitzer Prize winners with new audiences. And on this season of the podcast, we’re taking you on the road with us to a few of the live events we’ve been hosting over the past year.

This episode, we’re starting in Nashville, Tennessee and I’m joined by Marjorie Miller, the Administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes.

Marjorie Miller: Hi Nicole. I’m happy to be here with you.

Nicole Carroll: Me too. So back in November of 2025, we travelled to Nashville, Tennessee together.

Marjorie: Yes, we did.

Nicole: Yes, we did. But, unlike most of the tourists who go to Nashville, we weren’t there to listen to live music… we actually were surrounded by a very different kind of sound.

Speaker: Let’s make some noise if you’re here with your yearbook team.

Crowd: Cheers

Speaker: Okay, and who’s here with broadcast? 

Crowd: Cheers

Speaker: Okay. We got one more group, what about your newspaper?

Crowd: Cheers

Speaker: Oh! Okay!

Nicole: That is the sound of thousands of high school journalists.

Marjorie: Yes, it is. We were at the National High School Journalism Convention with more than 4,000 students from all around the country.

Nicole: Mhmm.

Marjorie: These are students who work on their school papers, yearbooks, news broadcasts. And the Pulitzer Prizes were there to present the keynote panel.

Nicole: Right. When we were planning for this panel, we knew we wanted to focus on local news because that’s what high school journalists do, right?

Marjorie: Mhmm.

Nicole: They cover their local news. And this is a topic I think a lot about because, when I’m not hosting this podcast or serving on the Pulitzer Board, I am the executive director of NEWSWELL.

NEWSWELL is a nonprofit based at Arizona State University. And what we do is we provide backend office support, business strategy and journalism support to local news organizations so they can cover their communities and we can help them build a sustainable business. That’s really critical right now because there has been a huge decline in local newsrooms around the country.

Marjorie: Mhmm.

Nicole: This past year there were 213 US counties without any local news source and 1500 more had only one local news source. So in many places, high school papers are actually the only source of local news.

Marjorie: Mhmm.

Nicole: And we know that communities need a shared set of facts in order to have a healthy democracy.

Marjorie: Right, and that’s why we wanted to invite local journalists or journalists with experience in local reporting.

Nicole: Mhmm.

Nicole: So we included Alissa Zhu, Jessica Gallagher and Toluse Olorunnipa for this panel. They’re all Pulitzer-winning journalists with deep experience in local news…

Marjorie: Alissa is a reporter and Jessica is a photojournalist – and they both work at The Baltimore Banner. They won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting for an investigative series they did about Baltimore’s fentanyl crisis. And Tolu won the 2023 Prize for General Nonfiction for a book he co-authored called His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice. Before that, of course, he worked in several newsrooms on local coverage.

Nicole: It was a fantastic panel. And we covered a lot during our conversation…

Marjorie: Yes.

Nicole: We talked about building trust in the communities they cover, how they find sources, the impact of their work, and how local stories can – and often do – have a national reach.

So, on today’s episode of Pulitzer on the Road, we’re going to share some of our keynote panel from the National High School Journalism Convention. And then we’ll hear some of the students in conversation with Alissa, Jessica and Tolu.

[clapping]

Nicole: Thank you all for being here tonight. We’re really happy that you’re here. We love that you love journalism and you’re here to learn more. And I wanted to tell you that we all have something in common with you. Before we were sitting here we were sitting out there. We were high school journalists. So we just want to see if you’re from our home states. So I am from Arizona. Is there anyone from Arizona here?

Audience: Woo.

Nicole: All right. Okay. Alright. Deer Valley High School.

Alissa Zhu: Uh, how about Missouri? [cheers] I'm so excited. Uh, anyone? Springfield. Oh, all right. That's okay. We can still talk.

Jessica Gallagher: Alabama? No, it's okay.

Toluse Olorunnipa: A couple, a couple.

Nicole: Yay, Alabama.

Toluse: Uh, how about the great state of Florida? [cheers]

Nicole: So before we get started, let me just tell you a little bit about the state of journalism out there. The most recent Medill state of local news report came out and it shows that over the past two decades, the number of news deserts has grown steadily.

This past year we have 213 US counties without any local news source and 1500 more, with only one local news source. That means that, in these counties, some 50 million Americans live with limited or no access to local news. In the past 25 years, close to 3,500 newspapers have vanished, leaving one in every four Americans with limited edition to local news. For all you broadcasters out there in July, as you know, the US Congress voted to rescind more than $1 billion in previous aid to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Collectively, the signals from these stations reach more than 90% of all US counties, including 82% of news deserts, making them a crucial piece of the local news information infrastructure.  So why is this a problem?

I know you know why it's a problem. I'm just gonna say it. Local news is trusted and communities need a shared set of facts in order to have a healthy democracy. There's research, there's academics here. They can tell you, research shows that if you're in a community with healthy local news, you have higher voting rates, you have less corruption, you have more civic engagement and less polarization. So here's the good news, I promise there's good news. People still want and need trusted news and information. They just want it in new ways, in new technology. And they want it from people they trust. So the good news is that all of you out there, you get to invent this future. You get to create the next form of trusted local journalism. And I can tell you, we need you so much. We need you to do this for your communities, you know, for your, your states. It's just incredibly important for the fabric of our society to have trusted local news. So we talk about different ways of doing it.

So I'm with NEWSWELL, it's about a 2-year-old startup that provides backend services and strategy to local newsrooms so they can focus on local news. The folks here from the Baltimore Banner, it's about three years old, and they are a nonprofit, but they get their revenue from subscriptions, from advertising and from donations. Their goal is long-term sustainability rather than maximizing profit. And then we've got The Atlantic. Do you guys have any idea how old The Atlantic is? Atlantic Magazine? Anybody have a guess? Yeah, I'm hearing some numbers. 60, 70. It's actually 168 years old, so yeah. Good. [clapping] Yeah. For The Atlantic, absolutely. Yes. So whether you become a content creator and go it alone and there's so many more resources out there for you, or you join a nonprofit like we represent, or you end up in a legacy institution, with all the reach and power that has, there's a place for you in journalism.

So let's get down to it and talk a little bit more about that. I'm gonna start with The Baltimore Banner. You all won the Pulitzer in local news for a fantastic and heartbreaking series on the overdoses coming from fentanyl in your area. How did you get, this is the big story nationally. How did you find that, the hook you did locally? And can you tell us a little bit about the work?

Alissa: Yeah, absolutely. So back in 2022, The Banner launched as a new startup. And our editor-in-chief at the time, one of the first things she did was to talk to a lot of different community members and community leaders trying to understand, you know, what are the big issues in Baltimore that are not being covered enough, not being talked about enough. And the overdoses story became one of our very first big projects. I think it represented the deeply investigated big swing that a lot of news organizations have kind of lost the ability to do over time. And we wanted to really highlight all the deaths that were happening from overdoses. Um, at that point it was about a thousand a year, just a huge tragedy for Baltimore and trying to understand why was Baltimore being hit so much harder than any other major American city.

Nicole: And you had a surprising finding, at least it was surprising to us in reading it. Can you talk about that? 

Alissa: Yeah, I remember, uh, Jess and I were actually doing an interview with a woman named Ms. Yvonne. And we were there because we wanted to talk to her about her son who had actually died of an overdose on his 50th birthday. She said something really shocking. It really made us pause. Which is, she said, ‘You know, overdoses affect everyone in this community, including all the seniors that live in my building.’ And, you know, I think our assumption was that drugs were kind of more of a young person's problem. But what we found through our reporting and through talking with Ms. Yvonne, a lot of folks who lived in senior apartments like hers and looking at the data, it's actually a generation of older Black men, you know, now in their fifties to seventies who have been dying from drug overdoses at extraordinarily high rates their entire lives.

Nicole: Which is, is tragic. So nothing's wrong with some healthy, um, competition. You know, you wanna, you wanna beat the competition to the story. But another big trend in journalism right now is collaboration, especially among the nonprofits. We all wanna help each other because our end goal is to get more news and information to you. So can you talk about the methodology and then you actually opened it up and you shared it with other news organizations?

Alissa: Yeah, so we collaborated with our amazing teammate, Nick Thieme, who comes from a data scientist background, and not a traditional journalism background, but he was able to do these really in-depth analysis with the data. and saw that, you know, not only was this generation of older Black men dying at really high rates in Baltimore, but also in similar cities all across the country. And instead of keeping that finding and that information to ourselves, our team thought to share it with a lot of other news organizations saying, you know, I think the national understanding of the opioid crisis is that it has affected a lot of white rural communities, maybe in places like Appalachia, and the drug overdose crisis had long been overlooked in places like Baltimore where it was affecting Black men. A lot of the people we talked to growing up, If they used drugs, they were arrested and incarcerated. And now, you know, we wanted to make sure that attention was being paid to this issue nationwide so that everyone could get the help they needed, from a medical perspective and from a, you know, social perspective.

Nicole: So why was it affecting older Black men? So disproportionately?

Alissa: I think it really has to do with the history of Baltimore. You know, the generation we're talking about came of age during a time where a lot of the well-paid manufacturing jobs were leaving the city. And there were just very few opportunities left in these Black neighborhoods that had been disinvested in for such a long time. And for a lot of the people we talked to, you know, their only job prospects or lucrative job prospects were to work in the drug trade that had infiltrated the neighborhoods.

Nicole: So Jessica, the photos in this series are just haunting. They're beautiful. What is the process? A lot of people think a photo is just taking the photo, but we know it starts much before then. Can you talk about your process? 

Jessica: Yeah. So me and Alissa spend a lot of time with folks. So my job is to take photos, right? But you don't come in with your camera out right away, right. You have to meet people, you have to build relationships, you have to spend that time together so they will open you up to their world, right? So that meant sitting on couches and drinking tea and hearing people's stories and building that trust so we could come back on some of the worst days, right? So we could come back when they have to go visit the grave of their loved one. So it's taking the time, sitting down. And then, I mean, one of our sources, we were in communication for a year before we even took a picture.

Nicole: Wow. Just to follow up on that, you know, you had to build a lot of trust with a lot of people in this, and at this point in our times, there's some distrust of the media and there's distrust of journalists. So how do you combat that? How do you gain that trust to be able to be with them in these really awful moments?

Jessica: Yeah, I mean, we also had a conversation before we even started the project, me, Alissa, Nick, about what we wanted to show with our images. We didn't wanna show people overdosing, which is hard during an overdose project, right? It's kinda what you expect. We didn't want to show people actively using drugs or needles. So I think it was really important for all of us to be on the same page and know what we were trying to photograph. We love Baltimore and we wanted Baltimore to be able to relate to this project.

Nicole: So what was the impact of the work? I know we always talk about, you know, we do this to have an impact in our communities. What what was the impact?

Alissa: The moment that really touched me after our pieces came out, I remember sitting down to coffee with a source and her actually coming to me and saying like, ‘You should know that your work has made a difference in the community.’ There are programs now being implemented in senior apartments. To help them. So, you know, hiring nurses to help connect people to addiction treatment or to making, to make sure that an overdose reversal drug called naloxone was available on every floor of the building. We've been able to see some pretty significant changes, and it was, it meant so much to be able to hear about that. Um, you know, apart from the programs in senior buildings there was also a lawmaker that passed a law requiring the Department of Health to update lawmakers on how they were better regulating drug treatment programs. And we also hear the city talking a lot about the issue, you know, how to solve it.

Nicole: So, when you were a high school student in Missouri, is this what you wanted? Is this what you dreamed of? Did you ever think you'd be, you know, making a difference in real people's lives, actually saving lives?

Alissa: I think that's why we all do this job, right? Like it feels so good to be a member of your community. You're learning about it every day. You're meeting your neighbors, you're getting outside of your bubble and you're also able to make a difference.

Nicole: It's excellent. Great, great job. I'm gonna bring in Tolu. So you previously worked at The Washington Post as a White House correspondent and recently moved to The Atlantic, and you got your start in local news at the Miami Herald. So in Baltimore they took this national story and made it local. In your case, you wrote the book on George Floyd and you took a very local case and, and made it national. So many people out there may have a great idea for a book. Where do you even start? Like how do you even get wrapped around the idea of creating this?

Toluse: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, a lot of times when we talk about journalism and talk about news reporting, we see it as the first draft of history. I'm sure you've heard about that in your high school classes about how the newspaper is the first draft of history. A lot of times we think about books as maybe the second draft of history or something that takes a little bit longer and something that is not necessarily right there in the moment, but something you can go back to and think about how reporting and journalism and book writing puts all the best pieces of journalism and literature together in order to capture history. I guess I should start by asking how many people remember where you were when the video of George Floyd started to circulate? Show of hands.

Yeah, yeah. A good, a good number of us saw that, and I'm sure a lot of you were probably middle school or even maybe earlier, and it kind of became something of its own, even before journalists really got a chance to turn it into a national story. It was something that had a life of its own. And that is one of the reasons why we talk about the way journalism is evolving. It did not necessarily take a huge crew of videographers and reporters to turn this into a national story. It took a 17-year-old girl who was standing on the corner with her phone, who videotaped this horrendous video and broadcast it to the world. And the world really connected with what had happened. And we, in The Washington Post newsroom, realized that something important was happening nationally and that we wanted to be a part of telling the story.

And so what started with a six part series in The Washington Post by myself and some of my colleagues about George Floyd's life, about the world that he grew up in, about his community, about his background, about his city turned into the underpinnings of what would become our book, which told the story of not only George Floyd's life, but the country that he grew up in. And one of the things that you want to do if you want to write a book is know that you have a story to tell. Know that you have something that people would be interested in and know that you're telling a broader story, not just about maybe a single individual, but what it tells us about a broader subject: our country, our history, humanity. We felt that as we learned about George Floyd's story, we could tell a broader story about who we were as a country.

Nicole: So you mentioned the 17-year-old who took the video. Her name was Darnella Frazier, and she won a special citation from the Pulitzer Prizes that year for her work. It was courageous for her to stay in there and take that video and then to circulate it to the world. Do you think this story would've gotten the traction it did without that video?

Toluse: Absolutely not. I mean, we live in a visual world and we live in a world of virality where things go viral because there are visuals. And one of the things that we captured as we were writing our book, I wrote this book with a co-author, Robert Samuels, and it is a lesson for me as a journalist, and it's a lesson for all of us. The press release from the police department after George Floyd was killed did not describe anything that we saw on the video. They described a medical incident that happened. It seemed all very aboveboard. They said no weapons were drawn. They said that, you know, this just happened and it was an unfortunate incident. And if not for this video, that would've been the history. There would not necessarily have been a broader story. And the high school student who took this video and decided to put it out into the world, even though she knew that that could lead to threats and, you know, potential harm to her own safety. She took that brave step, and that's one of the reasons why we had a different version of history. And it's a reminder of one of the tenets of journalism, which is to question everything–

Nicole: Yeah.

Toluse: Question authority, hold the powerful to account, and don't necessarily accept the first authoritative statement that you get from people in power without double checking, triple checking, making sure that you're not being misled because there is every incentive sometimes by the people in power to not give us the truth. And so the fact that you did have a brave high school student who was willing to document, witness history and become a journalist in her own right, just by showcasing what was happening, that was what allowed this story to become a national and international global story.

Nicole: So, Tolu, you mentioned that through your reporting on George Floyd, you wanted to shine a light on some broader national issues. Can you talk about what those issues are and what you found?

Toluse: You know one of the things that we learned in writing about George Floyd's story is that a lot of the issues that we talk about as a country – from policing to the criminal justice system, to the education system, to the healthcare system – George Floyd's life, sort of illuminated some of the inequities and some of the challenges that we have as a country, as we try to better ourselves and make a lot of these systems more fair and more just. And so we were really able to illuminate all of these various spheres of our society that we're all working to improve. And sometimes it takes a single person's life and being able to see a system through the lens of a person's life to understand how that system maybe has flaws or has issues that need to be improved upon. And we just sort of walked through George Floyd's life from, you know, when he started off as a young boy all the way through his adolescence, his time in school, his time in the criminal justice system, his time trying to work and trying to get treatment for his healthcare issues. And every time we examined some of the systems that he navigated, we realized that there were a number of issues that people could learn about by following his experience and seeing how his life differed from theirs and maybe experiencing some empathy. A lot of empathy took place when people saw the video of him dying, but we wanted to make sure that people understood that a lot of the things that he experienced during his life also were worthy of that empathy. 

Nicole: So one of the interesting things about being on the Pulitzer Board is every year we get to read the very best journalism of the year from all over the country. And so many times we see connections, we see people taking issues from different angles, but there's, there's some kind of connective tissue. Do you all see connections between your work in Baltimore and your work with George Floyd?

Alissa: Oh yeah, absolutely. When I was reading your book, it struck me that George Floyd was just born right around that generation we're talking about of Black men who grew up during a time period were over-policing and incarceration was the norm for folks that used drugs. And um the fact that his life was very similar to a lot of the folks that we interviewed for that story.

Toluse: Yeah, I totally saw, when I read the series and The Banner, a lot of those same issues. George Floyd actually left Houston to move to Minneapolis to get treatment, in part because he saw Minnesota as a state that had a stronger social safety net and had more opportunities for someone like him to get treatment. He was trying to be in rehab and change his life. And so some of those resources that now because of the good work of The Banner are now becoming more available for people like George Floyd, people who are a little bit older, but still need help and still need treatment. He was seeking that kind of treatment when he left his hometown. And so just realizing that that is an area where there is need. And one of the good things that journalism can do is shine a spotlight on a gap in our social safety net. And sometimes it's not necessarily because people are bad, it's just because, you know, there's not enough awareness about some of these issues that there, these gaps exist. And so one of the public service missions of journalism is to shine a light on some of these things to allow people to understand how we can make our society better by giving people those resources that they need.

Nicole: After this short break, we’ll continue our conversation and hear from some of the students.

Nicole: So not everybody just starts their careers at The Atlantic. So can you tell us about your journey from high school in Tallahassee, Florida to working at one of the most prestigious magazines?

Toluse: Yeah, so I, like a lot of you in this room knew that journalism sort of felt like a special place where you could do really interesting things. You could have a lot of fun, you could make a difference and you can spend a lot of time with interesting people. So from a very kind of early age, I keyed into that and was lucky enough to get an internship right out of high school working for my hometown paper, and was fortunate that there, there were job opportunities at the time where I could sort of throw myself at, the leadership of the newspaper and say, I'll do whatever you want. I'll, you know, I'll deliver papers if you want me to. I will deliver the mail if you want me to. And what I actually started off doing was helping write obituaries for people who passed away. And, you know, they were sort of short, short blurbs of just a couple of paragraphs, but I knew that one, this was really my only opportunity to write something that would appear in the paper. So I wanted to give a lot of attention to it. But even more importantly, this was the life story of the people who were being profiled in these obituaries, and it meant a lot to their family. So I spent a lot of time trying to make sure I got the wording right and make sure that I was able to tell these stories, even if I only had a couple of paragraphs in ways that would honor their legacies. And then I got my first internship at the Miami Herald, and that turned into my first full-time job. And I loved doing local journalism. I really felt like that was the way to make an impact and the way to connect with your community. And then when a job opened up at the national scale and I had an opportunity to move to Washington, D.C. and cover politics at that level, I jumped at it. And since then, I've just never, I've never looked back. I've had an opportunity to do a lot of journalism out of Washington, D.C. but the local journalism skills that I built starting off in my career, those are the skills that have really propelled me. And those are the skills that I rely on when I'm questioning leaders of world countries or writing about how a national policy might play out in impacting people across the world.

Nicole: Right. So, what I'm hearing is that every single thing you do matters and builds. Learning to get all the details right in an obituary has taught you the importance of accuracy. So when you got that next job, you took that with you. So there's no job too small in journalism.

Toluse: Yeah.

Nicole: So Jessica, now on to you. How did you get from high school journalist in Alabama to winning a Pulitzer at The Baltimore Banner?

Jessica: So I didn't go to journalism school in college, but I fell in love with journalism my last year of college and took all the electives. I went for commercial photography, fell in love and then graduated and had no idea what to do, 'cause I didn't go to J-School. Right? And I started working on weekends at my local paper in Alabama and I begged for that job and I didn't do great at the job and I kept coming back and I didn't know what captions were. And then I learned what captions were. So then I found my first time staff job in Georgia after that. And I worked at a bunch of tiny papers and, but local news was always the dream and… yeah.

Nicole: And look at you now.

Jessica: [laughs]

Nicole: So, Alissa, on to you. Can you talk about your journey from high school journalist in Missouri to Pulitzer Prize winner at The Baltimore Banner?

Alissa: Yeah, I mean, to be honest, I joined my high school paper because it was a good opportunity to pull my friends out of class and hang out with them. And I think I learned that I love to be nosy. I think as a journalist you just have like the ultimate excuse to get into other people's business. And, uh, from high school journalism, I got a degree, undergraduate degree in journalism at Northwestern University, and started doing internships at different local organizations. So I was at a public radio station, my hometown. I did an internship with  the public radio station in Chicago. And, from there similarly worked my way up, just moving from paper to paper, and learning all I could. 

Nicole: So again, just a lot of grit and gumption and putting the work in to get to where you are. Um, so I can tell you I was my high school yearbook editor. How many, you got a lot of yearbook people here, right? Yeah. [cheers] Yeah. I too loved being able to roam the hallways with a camera and just like, be in everybody's business and, and get to learn everything about this school. It was really cool. So, again, even what you're doing right now on your high school yearbook, or your broadcast station or your newspaper, will build to where you're at. So I wanna ask about your current state, and we'll start down there. What do you love about your job now?

Toluse: I love telling stories. I, to put it pretty plainly, I love writing, but I love telling people's stories and showcasing the beauty of people's humanity through telling their stories and bringing their stories to light. And using storytelling to shine a light on broader issues that maybe aren't getting enough attention. And that will help people see the world in a different way and maybe hold powerful people to account. I work out of Washington, D.C., there are a lot of important policy makers and important people there who sometimes need to know a little bit more about how their work, how their efforts impact people in real life, 'cause sometimes Washington can feel like a game, a little bit. So I like telling the story of the impact of the policies, the way that politicians sometimes forget and bring into light the stories of people who may otherwise feel or seem like they're not as important as the powerful people who are making all of these decisions, but in my eyes, they're just as important if not more important. And I like bringing those stories to light.

Nicole: So, Jessica, what is the best thing about your job?

Jessica: I mean, the best thing is definitely the community, right? I don't think you're a good local journalist. If you're not being berated in a grocery store, everyone should know your name, right? You should be able to walk down the block. And even if people just yell like, ‘camera lady,’ it's a great, it's a great sign. I mean, I feel like my job as a photojournalist is to tell love stories of our community and love stories don't always have good endings, but we have incredible people. And if it's a mom fighting to tell the story about her daughter that she slowly lost, it's the best to be able to show a final product and make them feel a little less alone at the end of the day and have their story shared. So I think the community is absolutely the best part.

Nicole: Did they really call you ‘Hey, camera lady‘?

Jessica: I have been called ‘camera lady.’ I've been called worse, but ‘camera lady’ is good.

Nicole: And what about you? What's the best part about your job?

Alissa: When journalism is good, it's really good. You know, I can't imagine a more fun and dynamic job to have. I think your day as a journalist, you just never know what it's gonna look like when you walk in through the door in the morning. You could be running out to cover some breaking news. You're probably meeting a bunch of new people. And you know, every day you start the day as a student and then you end up being the teacher. You just get to learn so much. 

Nicole: What is your advice to your younger self sitting out there right now? What would you tell yourself if you could go back in time?

Toluse: You know, even at a young age, you can be a journalist, you can tell a story, you don't have to wait your turn, quote unquote. Yes, it's important to learn from people who have come before you, but one of the best ways to learn in journalism is to do, is to write, is to record, is to report and get out there and do it and learn and be fearless about it. And yes, be humble that you're not gonna get everything right. But don't let that humility stop you from trying. So I would tell myself to, to go out there and, and just do, just be a journalist. Even if you don't have a job yet, even if you don't have an outlet that you're reporting to, you've got a phone, you've got the internet, you've got your own mind that you can use to tell a story. And even if you're only telling it to a small group, even if you're only telling it to your classmates, you're building the blocks of the skillset that you're gonna need to tell a story that can go global and that people across the world can engage with. And so that's what I would tell my younger self, and that's what I would tell all of you. Have no fear. Go out there and report.

Nicole: Have no fear. Darnella Frazier was 17.

Toluse: Yeah.

Nicole: She changed the world.

Toluse: Yep.

Nicole: What about you, Jessica? What's your advice to your 17-year-old self?

Jessica: Oh, man. Just keep going. It's so hard sometimes: everyone around me was getting internships. I didn't get a single internship. Everyone was getting these amazing opportunities and I was like, oh, I don't really know what I'm doing. I'm gonna figure it out. So I kept going. I kept trying new things. I kept getting turned down for being too artsy or not wanting to show things a certain way. And I just kept trying to do things my way, in ways that I thought would represent the communities that we were a part of. And I think it got us to where we are now. And it's just keep going, keep trying, be creative, be weird. It'll work out.

Nicole: What about you?

Alissa: If you see a fire you wanna run towards it and not away from it. And I'm speaking metaphorically here, like if you're gonna do that literally, be careful. When I was a young journalist, there was a sense like, oh, you have to end up in a place like New York or DC to get a job. But actually there are just so many communities out here that maybe are overlooked that really need good journalists. And you know, we really need to invest in those communities.

Nicole: That's great. And I would just add, a friend of mine always says, create your turn. You talked about this as well. Don't wait. When I was in junior high at Canyon, Texas, we didn't have a newspaper and I wanted to work for one. So I started the Canyon Junior High Eagle's Eye and I still have it framed in my office, you know, next to being editor of USA Today. So create your turn. Like journalism is waiting for you to find the solutions and we need you now more than ever. So, um, let's thank our panel and we're gonna take a quick break.

After our panel, students had opportunities to ask Alissa, Jessica and Tolu for their thoughts about reporting strategies, developing sources, and navigating challenges as local journalists. They were surrounded by students eager for their advice.

Student: How would you guys recommend high schoolers go about approaching or finding topics that are not already being reported on by their local news, but they can connect to their communities?

Toluse: Yeah, that's a great question. And there's probably more opportunity to do that now than there was in the past because local news has declined so much. There's so much space that is not being covered. And I would say spend time out in your community, talk to your friends, talk to people at other high schools, talk to the people at the grocery store and get a sense for what people are experiencing in their own lives. If there's a question you have about why this works or doesn't work in your community, why is there always this pothole on this street? Why does the light not turn on at this hour in this part of town? Like, those kinds of questions are often stories that people just don't know are stories because they haven't had the time to dig into it. I would say go to your county and city board meetings. Go to city court and spend time there. Start with a big question and dig into it

Student: How does working for a more local organization like the Miami Herald or something like that, contrast or compare with working for a larger national organization with The Atlantic or Washington Post and just how have you found the differences in the environments there?

Toluse: Working in local news, I felt the impact of what I was doing more immediately and more deeply because I was writing about people that I knew and people whose lives could be changed more quickly based on the stories that I was doing. Writing for national papers, you kind of hope that you're having that impact. You know that you're reaching more people, but you don't know if that impact is happening as deeply. And so it's a different kind of impact. but both jobs have a lot of responsibility and also have a lot of reward that come along with them. 

Alissa: I think being a local journalist at a smaller publication, you have the room to write a bajillion different stories, wear a ton of hats and get lots of clips. I think it's also small enough of a space that inevitably when you make mistakes, like it's not national, you know. I think having that room to grow was really important. You know, I think people have a lot of preconceived notions about different places in different cities. I think it's like the cities that are being undercovered and the ones that maybe have issues with crime or drugs or et cetera, that make people not wanna move there. That's what makes a valuable place to have journalists.

Nicole: One person asked Alissa what happens when your community and your neighbors don’t like what you’re reporting?

Alissa: My first job at the Springfield News Leader, it was so interesting 'cause I grew up in that community and one of the city council members was the dad of a girl I had gone to school with since middle school. I had been in his backyard for pool parties and stuff as a kid. And the guy in charge of parks and rec was my high school ex-boyfriend's dad. And, it was just like, so interesting. Seeing your role shift from just like a person who happens to live somewhere, to a person that is covering an area for everyone that lives there and, you do upset people. I think you're probably not doing your job right as a journalist if people aren't upset about what you write once in a while. And if it's for the right reasons. And so I think the main lesson I learned from my time in Springfield, especially covering local government where like you're having to hold leaders accountable, was you just wanna keep lines of communication open. So I wrote a series of stories about a whistleblower complaint against the Green County Commissioner. And he was irate. And he called me on my phone to yell at me and he yelled at me for a good 20 minutes and I just sat on the phone with them and listened to it. I don't think you should always subject yourself to verbal abuse from people, but I think that it was helpful for me to show him like I am always available to talk to and I'm always willing to listen. And what I told him at the end of the call is just like, ‘Thanks for sharing your thoughts with me. I just think it's really important that we keep lines of communication open. I'm gonna continue to cover the Green County Commission and I'm going to continue to write stories about what happens in our community because I think it's important. And just feel free to call back again whenever.’ So I think you just have to make clear that even if someone is upset with you, you're willing to listen to them.

Throughout the convention, a lot of the students had questions like “what to do when powerful people are trying to influence your reporting?”

Student 1: We currently live in a world that is very money driven and a very power hungry society where it feels as news can be either easily influenced or hidden by those who rank above us financially or because of a title. So, how can I and other journalists stay motivated and create public work that is still widely seen, truthful, and make a change while also staying true to myself and my moral compass?

Toluse: It is a difficult news environment that we're living in and there are a lot of moneyed interests that want to shape what people think and shape how the news is written and read and reported. But more importantly than, you know, one rich guy with a lot of money is your own audience, your own community, the people who would listen to you. There's no way that money can buy their trust. And if you have a trusted community, if you are focused on the truth, people value that more than money connections. And people can see through a lot of the, for lack of a better term, AstroTurf style news that's out there, that's not grassroots. It's not true to the community. And so if you can provide people information that is true, that feels relevant to them, that is helpful to them, that helps them live their lives. They're going to trust you more than they trust some random person who throws a bunch of money at another organization that doesn't care about the community. You can build a community, you can build an audience and sometimes having the power of an audience is more important than having the power of a dollar.

As a young journalist, it can be hard to know how to begin… especially if you don’t have the financial resources to do so. But one of the amazing things about technology these days is that you don’t need a lot of money to get started. You can create an email newsletter, you can start a zine, you can cover local news on social media. What’s most important is that you simply get out there and start covering the news, building an audience, and developing trust. And if you don’t feel like you have the resources you need, you know, you can look for a creative solution.

Student: How did you deal if you even felt this at all of like feeling inferior to other journalists around you? Maybe 'cause you didn't have like the most powerful equipment or that kind of stuff.

Jessica: A photographer isn't made by their gear. It's made by the moments they capture, the time they spend. You can have the best camera in the world and be the worst photographer, but you can have an iPhone and take the best pictures that mean the world, right? So when you're comparing yourself, gear is gear. You'll get there eventually. I had so much broken gear when I started and I was always 10 miles behind everyone else. 'Cause I had gear that was held together with paperclips, right? And I was like, oh, if only I had better gear. And I was like, okay, if I can't get the top action moment, I can get the quiet moment where they're hugging their mom at the end. Right? So find the quieter moments that you can capture with the gear that you have. And it took a long time to get good. I was so bad and then I kept trying and I kept pushing and I studied. I studied everyone that I looked up to and I asked them questions so just keep pushing, studying, find other ways to be better.

Nicole: That's such a good question. There are studies out there that show that the predictor of success isn't gear or opportunity. It's grit and persistence. So I think every single one of us has said these same words, keep going, keep going.

That felt like our motto throughout the convention: just keep going… Like I said at the beginning of our panel, people still want and need trusted local journalism. And the democratic fabric of our society depends on local news sources. We need these young reporters, editors and photojournalists to equip communities with information to help them face the future. And there’s no time like the present to start creating the next iteration of trusted local journalism.  

That’s it for this episode of Pulitzer on the Road!

Thank you to Alissa Zhu, Jessica Gallagher and Toluse Olorunnipa for joining us.

If you enjoyed this episode of Pulitzer on the Road, I highly recommend you check out our previous episodes we’ve done with local reporting winners. There’s the episode called, “Going Beyond the Data” and another one featuring “AL.com in Alabama.” You can find links to these episodes in our show notes.

For more details about the work of all Pulitzer winners, please visit our website at pulitzer.org.

Pulitzer on the Road is a production of the Pulitzer Prize Board.

This show is hosted by me, Nicole Carroll.

Our senior producer is Justine Daum.

Mixing by Davy Sumner and Jason Richards.

A special thank you to the Journalism Education Association, the National Scholastic Press Association, Amber James and Jeff Eason and his AV team.  

If you’re in high school or know someone in high school who is interested in journalism, the National High School Journalism Convention happens twice a year. You can find more information at journalismconvention.org.

Thank you to James Bittel and Anthony J. Mangone at Columbia Journalism Broadcast Technology. And thank you to Alex Kosiorek and Anna Williams at Central Sound Studio.

Music licensing by APM and Epidemic Sound.

Editing, promotion and other support by Pamela Casey, Edward Kliment and Sean Murphy. Marjorie Miller is our executive producer.