How a 12-person newsroom won two Pulitzer Prizes

Chicago’s Invisible Institute leans into having "hard conversations."

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May 14, 2024

The biggest surprise of last week’s Pulitzer Prize announcements was that the Invisible Institute, a small, nonprofit outlet based on Chicago’s South Side, had won two of the highly prestigious awards. (The dozen-person newsroom had previously shared a 2021 national reporting Pulitzer with partners AL.com, the Marshall Project, and IndyStar.)

“This is really a moment for the organization,” the Invisible Institute’s founder, Jamie Kalven, tells Depth Perception. “To have received two Pulitzers for two very different projects that both reflect the kind of underlying ethos of the organization feels like it confirms something about what we’ve collectively built.

“Unlike a lot of reporting, where people just kind of swoop into a neighborhood, grab quotes or narrative material, we’ve really been immersed in the story that we’ve been trying to tell, which is fundamentally an ongoing inquiry into the particular forms of racial apartheid in urban America, which are very dramatic in Chicago.”

The Invisible Institute’s data director, trina reynolds-tyler, and City Bureau’s Sara Conway won the local reporting prize for their deep dive into how Chicago police have mishandled investigations into missing Black girls and women. The project took the form of a podcast, Missing in Chicago, and an accompanying feature in the Chicago Reader.

Meanwhile, the staffs of the Invisible Institute and USG Audio won the audio reporting prize for their podcast You Didn’t See Nothin. Hosted by formerly incarcerated journalist Yohance Lacour, You Didn’t See Nothin investigates a brutal 1997 hate crime on the South Side. A few days later, the project won a Peabody Award for podcast & radio.

In a joint interview, Kalven and reynolds-tyler spoke to Depth Perception about their Pulitzer wins and the Invisible Institute’s way of doing journalism. The following has been edited for length and clarity. —Mark Yarm

First of all, what does it feel like to win a Pulitzer?

reynolds-tyler: Many of our sources, many of my family members do not know what a Pulitzer Prize is. And when we’re letting our sources know about this, they’re excited, but they’re interested in this resolution introduced by the City Council [to create the Mayor’s Task Force on Missing Women] where we’ll be able to speak about the findings, and families will have an opportunity to be seen and to be heard, to be believed about their lived experiences.

But honestly, I did a little ugly cry. I thought about the toll that this had on mine and Sarah’s mental health along the way. It was extremely dark reading autopsy reports back to back to back.

Kalven: There was true joy in our office and our newsroom when that news came. But we’re always coming back to the work. We need to get through this week and settle down, but the whole spirit and ethos of the Invisible Institute is that it’s about the work. And this sort of public acknowledgement gives us that much more capacity to do the work going forward.

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Obviously the Invisible Institute doesn’t have the name recognition, or the size of, say, the New York Times. What is the advantage to being a small outlet?

Kalven: That’s a really good question at this moment of economic crisis in journalism. There have been periods when we’ve been really hand-to-mouth; we’re in a fairly stable place in terms of funding right now. We’ve been clear about staying fairly small. And that’s an advantage. We’ve seen this with a number of online publications and other initiatives: If you make continued growth your measure of success and impact, you can derail economically and you can derail organizationally.

We’re not like a radio station or newspaper just trying to fill that news hole all the time. So much of journalism is redundant, just the same stories being [reported by everyone]. Even when the quality of some of the journalism is good, the redundancy is enervating. And so we’re always contemplating whether investing in a particular line of investigation, What does this add? Is this reporting that won’t get done if we don’t do it?

reynolds-tyler: To me, the benefit of being small is that we get to really get personal. One part of our mission is to have hard conversations, to make information accessible to the public so that the people can discuss together. And we model a lot of this stuff on our working relationships with each other. There are so many kinds of conversations that we have internally that I don’t think we could have had if we were much larger.

[T]he whole spirit and ethos of the Invisible Institute is that it’s about the work. And this sort of public acknowledgement gives us that much more capacity to do the work going forward. —Jamie Kalven, founder

trina, your investigation is having real-world impact: As you mentioned earlier, Chicago’s mayor and nine aldermen proposed a resolution to create a task force to look into missing persons. Can you tell me more about how that came about?

reynolds-tyler: The day after we published, we actually presented to the Illinois Task Force on Missing and Murdered Chicago Women. I can’t speak to the way that the City Council members came together. They didn’t tell us, like, “We read your reporting. So good.” It sounds like Alderwoman [Stephanie D.] Coleman went to the Women’s Caucus after reading the story and basically organized them to introduce this resolution.

Kalven: Part of our orientation is to be sort of skeptical about impact. In the sense that journalists and journalism organizations and startups like ours are often, I think, overselling their impact: This law was changed, people were fired, whatever. And we obviously have had a history of that kind of impact in Chicago. But we also grapple with the reality that there’s very little evidence that the underlying conditions that have given rise to the harms we report on have been significantly altered.

So really, our metric of impact is: Have there been changes in the lived experience of the people most affected? And we want to keep coming back to that core sense of why we do the work we do.

Missing in Chicago grew out of a machine learning project that trina heads up called Beneath the Surface, which “investigates the intersections of gender-based violence and policing.” How do you both feel about the growing use of AI in journalism more generally?

reynolds-tyler: What I love about Beneath the Surface is that we are working with machine learning, but we’re also working with people. There are community members, volunteers, who created training data for this machine learning process. We’re not outsourcing cheap labor in other countries to get some quick training data.

A lot of people who are working in the AI world, they’re like, “We’re just gonna build this model real quick, and we’re gonna see what it says. And we’ll make decisions off of that” — instead of taking the time to include people along the way.

Using machine learning, we saw this pattern of [police] misconduct allegations related to missing persons cases. The complaints became the breadcrumbs. And as we spoke to more and more people, we found that there are many people in society who continue to have these lived experiences around missing persons case investigations.

Kalven: AI is a very mixed phenomenon, but I think there is immense potential. Right now, across the country, there are almost unimaginable amounts of data being produced by police body cameras that nobody looks at, because there’s just too much. Imagine what you could learn if you had the means to interrogate that body of data. You could learn things about good policing, as well as patterns of bad policing.

There’s a lot of doom and gloom in the media industry these days. What gives you both hope for the future of journalism?

Kalven: If I were to say one word, it would be “trina.”

Some years ago, I was on one of these many panels on the crisis in journalism. And this was quoted back to me by somebody recently. I said, “Sometimes it’s necessary for the big trees that have cast a lot of shade to fall for new growth to emerge.” And now I feel like we’re really seeing some of the new growth. If you look at the range of news organizations that won Pulitzers over the last several years, there are an increasing number of nonprofit startups in that mix. And there’s not yet an alternative business model. But the ingredients are emerging, and we’re looking for the recipe.

reynolds-tyler: Thank you, Jamie, for saying that. Sarah and I spent a lot of time rebuilding relationships with families who decided that they were no longer speaking to the media. They were like, “I felt hurt by journalists.” And I’m sure those were well-meaning journalists who were like, “We have to get the story,”

We must have hope in the future of journalism or else we will lose the thread on the point of this whole thing. We must talk to impacted people. Coming back to the AI piece, we need to be mindful about the importance and value of people over cool new tech things. You cannot replace people. I have a lot of hope just from being in relationships with those families. I know it’s possible.

How a 12-person newsroom won two Pulitzer Prizes

Chicago’s Invisible Institute leans into having "hard conversations."

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