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| Ryan Gabrielson |
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| Paul Giblin |
UA journalism alumni and Pulitzer winners
will discuss investigative reporting at Oct. 8 visit
Two alumni of The University of Arizona’s journalism program who won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting in April will meet with classes in the School of Journalism and give a public lecture on Thursday, Oct. 8.
Paul Giblin, a 1988 graduate of the UA School of Journalism, and Ryan Gabrielson, who took classes in the school and wrote for the Arizona Daily Wildcat, will discuss “Investigative Reporting and the Pulitzer Prize” at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 8, in the Education Building Room 211. It is free and open to the public. Giblin and Gabrielson wrote their award-winning five-part series on slow response times and dropping arrest rates in the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office. Ultimately the project, “Reasonable Doubt,” unearthed ways in which the MCSO's intense focus on immigration resulted in the faltering enforcement of other crimes.
The journalists spent six months investigating thousands of documents for the series, which was published by the East Valley Tribune. Giblin now is the co-founder of The Arizona Guardian, a subscription-based news site that focuses on Arizona politics and government. He’s a journalist with 24 years of experience as an editor, columnist and reporter in Arizona, Hawaii and New Mexico. He has covered federal affairs, immigration, politics, business and sports.
Gabrielson is an investigative reporting fellow at the University of California, Berkeley for the 2009-2010 school year. During five years at the East Valley Tribune, he covered higher education, law enforcement, politics, and city, state and federal government. He began his career at The Monitor, a daily newspaper in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, covering corruption and other assorted border issues.
The Pulitzer committee said the East Valley Tribune deserved the award because of “adroit use of limited resources to reveal, in print and online, how a popular sheriff’s focus on immigration enforcement endangered investigation of violent crime and other aspects of public safety,” according to the Pulitzer Prize Web site. The series also won the George Polk Award for Justice Reporting, the Best of the Westfirst place award for investigative reporting and the Arizona Press Club’s Don Bolles Award for investigative reporting. The work also was selected as a finalist in the Investigative Reporters and Editors contest. In addition, the project was featured on the national PBS television show “NOW on PBS” and on the PBS site “Exposé: America’s Investigative Reports.”
Gabrielson and Giblin are not the only former UA students to win the Pulitzer.
• Nancy Cleeland, a 1977 graduate, was a lead writer on a 2004 series for the Los Angeles Times about Wal-Mart’s
labor policies and sourcing practices that won both the Pulitzer and Polk awards;
• UA journalism graduates Frank Sotomayor ’66 and Jose Galvez ’72 were part of a team of editors and reporters,
also for the Los Angeles Times, that won the Pulitzer for Public Service in 1984 for an in-depth examination of
southern California’s growing Latino community. Virginia Escalante ’71, a UA education major and journalism minor,
was also part of that LA Times’ team;
• Ernest Sotomayor ’77 was part of an editing team at Newsday that won a 1992 Pulitzer for Spot News Reporting on a
subway crash that killed five people;
• Other UA journalism alumni were involved in Pulitzer efforts. Jan Thiessen '71, who was city editor and executive news editor at the San Diego Evening Tribune in 1979 when the staff won
for Spot News Reporting for its coverage of the collision of a Pacific Southwest air liner with a small plane over its city. And Olaf Frandsen
was the editor of The Odessa American, in Odessa, Texas, in 1987 when it won the Pulitzer for
Spot News Photography for coverage of the rescue of Baby Jessica McClure, the 18-month-old girl who fell into a water well pipe and was
stuck there for 54 hours. Frandsen is now publisher of The Monitor and regional vice president
for Freedom Communications, also owner of the East Valley Tribune, where Gabrielson and Giblin won their Pulitzer.
In addition, Terry Wimmer, who joined the UA journalism faculty in 2006, led an investigation of fertility clinics for the Orange County Register that won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.
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