Project 2
Journalism’s influential awards lack diverse judges
A groundbreaking investigative through the AAJA Voices fellowship that resulted in a first-of-its kind dataset and calls for change by top news leaders.
Judges of color still find themselves the only member of their race or ethnicity in the room.
In April 2022, OpenNews published an open letter to the Pulitzer Prize board, calling for the prize to play a bigger part in pushing for diversity in the news industry, in which 77% of newsroom workers are still non-Hispanic white.
That got the Asian American Journalists Association Voices program investigative team thinking: what does diversity look like on the prize boards themselves?
We were shocked to find that, in its 104-year history, the Pulitzer Prizes has only had one Asian American voting judge — who wasn't appointed until 2020.
We embarked on two months of tireless outreach to collect a first-of-its-kind dataset on the racial and ethnic identities of top prize judges, as well as conducting in-depth interviews with news leaders and prize administrators.
I created a web scraper to get initial data across four prize boards. I handled outreach and interviews for the Livingston Awards, and created all interactive graphics in the final piece.
The final piece was republished by The Objective.
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