An expansive reporting team that includes a former Daily staff member won a Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting Monday for a collection of stories about offshore tax havens.
Ryan Chittum worked as a news reporter, special projects reporter and opinion page editor for The Daily from 2000 to the end of 2001. He is currently part of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which worked with more than 100 media outlets worldwide to publish what has been dubbed The Panama Papers.
The "papers" are a compilation of stories, originally published in April 2016, that "expose the hidden infrastructure and global scale of offshore tax havens." It is considered the largest data journalism project in history, with more than 2.6 terabytes of leaked data used in its reporting.
Chittum said the Pulitzer Prize win is gratifying, and it shows the importance of journalism in the modern world.
"It shows what this kind of investigation can do and how it can be rewarded," said Chittum, who was also a reporter at The Wall Street Journal from 2002 to 2007.
Chittum said he worked closely on The Panama Papers' story about Iceland, which eventually led the country's former Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson to resign. Chittum said it was an honor to work with the hundreds of people who made all of the stories in the Pulitzer Prize-winning project possible.
"When you're working with all of these different publications together towards a shared goal, it's a different kind of journalism. It's not something I had never done before ICIJ," Chittum said. "It's fun."
Last year, three OU alums won Pulitzer Prizes: Los Angeles Times staffers Mark Potts and Hailey Branson-Potts won the prize for their reporting during the San Bernardino, California, terrorist attacks, and The Washington Post deputy investigations editor David Fallis won for an investigative project about police shootings.
To see the full list of 2017 Pulitzer Prize winners, click here.
