Chicago Tribune and BGA win Pulitzer Prize for local reporting
A powerful and painstaking investigation into fatal fires that exposed flaws in Chicago’s building code enforcement and the permanent scars left on survivors has earned the Chicago Tribune and the Better Government Association the highest honor in journalism: a Pulitzer Prize.
“The Failures Before the Fires,” a collaboration between Cecilia Reyes of the Tribune and Madison Hopkins of the BGA, was awarded the Pulitzer for local reporting Monday.
Published in April 2021, the nearly two-year investigation — disrupted by the pandemic — dug deep into data and then fleshed out the stories behind the numbers with compassion and color, shining a light on an ongoing tragedy and the impact of local reporting.
“It’s a thrill any year for a news organization to be honored with a Pulitzer Prize, but to produce such high-quality work during such a tumultuous year in our newsroom is a remarkable achievement,” said Mitch Pugh, executive editor of the Tribune.
It is the 28th Pulitzer award for the Tribune and the first for the BGA, a century-old Chicago-based nonprofit news organization. The story was edited by Kaarin Tisue at the Tribune and David Kidwell at the BGA.
The Tribune and the BGA joined forces on the project in November 2019. In March, the pandemic hit, Reyes was assigned to cover breaking news and the project was essentially put on hold until fall 2020.
That’s when Reyes and Hopkins renewed efforts to pore through data, reach out to officials and talk to the families that were devastated by the loss of loved ones in tragic and potentially preventable fires.
Cecilia Reyes, 28, is an investigative reporter who joined the Tribune in 2016. Born and raised in Mexico City, Reyes earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Columbia University in New York and previously worked as a Google Journalism and News Apps fellow.
Reyes called the Pulitzer honor “bittersweet,” appreciating the recognition for the many hours of hard work she shared with Hopkins, but focusing still on the story itself, and the survivors and people who had lost loved ones.
“It’s a story about other people, and the things that they shouldn’t have had to deal with,” Reyes said. “I just think about a lot of the really difficult conversations we had with people and a lot of pain and loss and things like that could have been preventable.”
Reyes and Hopkins’ work revealed that at least 61 men, women and children died in fires after Chicago officials had been warned — often repeatedly — of major fire safety issues in the buildings where they lived. The majority of the victims were Black. Many were children.
These tragedies were the deadly consequences of systemic shortfalls in Chicago’s building enforcement program, Reyes and Hopkins found. Their reporting uncovered a convoluted system of informal rules, outdated records and lax oversight that put the interests of landlords above the safety of tenants.
Many of the city’s failures, the reporters found, directly contributed to the fire deaths.
To arrive at these conclusions, Hopkins and Reyes examined all 140 fatal fires that occurred in Chicago homes from 2014 through 2019, reviewing tens of thousands of pages of public records.
One woman, Shamaya Coleman, lost four children to a fire in a building that, unbeknownst to her, had a yearslong history of safety issues.
“These landlords should not be able to rent, buy, do anything unless everything is up to par,” Coleman told the reporters. “There should be no exceptions for anyone, not for the state and not for the landlord. You are putting somebody else’s lives in danger, period.”
The investigation also showed that in a city scarred by a long history of tragic fires, politicians have repeatedly promised to make things better, then failed to follow through. Political rhetoric about strict enforcement repeatedly gave way to broken promises, watered-down regulations and abandoned reforms.
One father of a little girl who died in a fire dedicated himself to working with the City Council to create a system that would warn people about safety hazards at rental properties. Only upon being contacted for the series did he find out the ordinance he pushed for had been abandoned.
Just before the investigation was published, city officials took up the matter again, making a new effort to identify dangerous housing in Chicago. But in a follow-up story, Reyes and Hopkins found the new list of “building code scofflaws” excluded hundreds of properties with dangerous safety violations.
To identify more effective potential fixes for Chicago’s failures, the reporters looked at building safety practices in the nation’s 20 most populated cities.
They found that elsewhere, officials have responded to loss of life by beefing up housing inspections and implementing more effective enforcement programs. Housing officials and other experts credit such measures with substantially improving building safety.
“This is the highest honor in journalism, but I’m mindful that the problems we identified have not been substantively addressed by the city,” said David Greising, president and chief executive of the Better Government Association. “The work is not done. Lives are still at risk. And this will just renew our commitment to covering the lack of action and protecting lives from fires that the city can prevent from happening.”
Tisue, 53, an investigations editor at the Tribune since 2009 and a 25-year veteran at the newspaper, said the efforts of Reyes and Hopkins are even more remarkable in light of navigating the logistical challenges of the pandemic.
“I give them a lot of credit for forging ahead through that tough time and getting this accomplished despite that obstacle,” Tisue said.
Hopkins, who was an investigative research assistant at the Chicago Tribune while earning her master’s degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 2016, now works as a health accountability reporter at the Kansas City Beacon.
“Madison Hopkins is one of the most resourceful, persistent and organized reporters I’ve ever worked with,” said Greising. “Once I got to know her and her work, it would have surprised me if she didn’t win a Pulitzer.”
Reyes, who lives in the Rogers Park neighborhood, said the Pulitzer-winning project required a seven-day-a-week commitment when the heavy lifting began in fall 2020.
She said winning a Pulitzer at her first full-time newspaper job is a “great honor and somewhat unbelievable.” The work, she said, was its own reward.
“It’s incredible to be able to do the digging and the reporting and the talking to people,” Reyes said. “It requires a lot of stamina, but at the end of the day, I can’t think of wanting to do anything else.”
The Tribune last won a Pulitzer in 2017, when E. Jason Wambsgans was awarded the top prize for feature photography for “a superb portrayal of a 10-year-old boy and his mother striving to put the boy’s life back together after he survived a shooting in Chicago.”
In 2012, then-Tribune columnist Mary Schmich won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
