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Parkland Students Bask in Pulitzer Mention: ‘They Took Us Seriously’
By Patricia Mazzei
April 16, 2019

MIAMI — As 3 p.m. approached on Monday, the editors of The Eagle Eye student newspaper at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., huddled around their adviser’s desk for the announcement of this year’s Pulitzer Prizes.

They watched not as journalism groupies, but as award contenders.

In an unusual move, the staff had submitted an entry to the most prestigious of journalism prizes for coverage of the mass shooting at their school, including a special memorial issue devoted entirely to 17 detailed obituaries honoring the classmates, teachers and coaches they lost on Feb. 14, 2018.

“We knew it was a long shot,” said Hannah Kapoor, 18, one of the newspaper’s co-editors in chief.

As it happened, when Dana Canedy, the Pulitzer awards’ administrator, began to announce the winners, The Eagle Eye was the first publication she named.

“I want to break with tradition and offer my sincere admiration for an entry that did not win, but that should give us all hope for the future of journalism in this great democracy,” Ms. Canedy said. Then she cited The Eagle Eye’s submission, which described how Parkland’s 44 student reporters and editors had to “put aside our grief and recognize our role as both survivors, journalists and loved ones of the deceased.”

“These budding journalists remind us of the media’s unwavering commitment to bearing witness, even in the most wrenching of circumstances, in service to a nation whose very existence depends on a free and dedicated press,” Ms. Canedy said. “There is hope in their example.”

The recognition was momentous for scholastic journalism, an important training ground for young reporters, who often feel that their achievements in the field get little attention from professional organizations.

“Sometimes, I don’t think that adults — and publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post — they don’t get to see that amazing work,” said Rebecca Schneid, 17, The Eagle Eye’s other co-editor, who has considered joining the student newspaper when she attends Duke University this fall. “And a lot of times, student journalists underestimate the power of their words or their ability to make a difference.”

In an interview on Tuesday, Ms. Canedy said student entries are always her favorites, but the quality of The Eagle Eye’s reporting stood out. “It was actually a very competitive entry,” she said. “I was so inspired by what they did.”

Ms. Canedy said she plans to reach out in the coming days to invite some of The Eagle Eye staff to the Pulitzer luncheon in New York next month as her guests.

“They’re the future,” she said. “We’re in good hands with young people like this.”

As the winners were announced on Monday, the half-dozen student editors who gathered around the computer screen with their faculty adviser, Melissa Falkowski, realized with a bit of disappointment that they had missed out on an award. Yet they had been honored in front of a national audience nonetheless.

“They don’t usually mention the losers,” said Ms. Falkowski, 36.

By Tuesday, the initial disappointment had turned to sheer pride.

“The work our newspaper did last year — and continues to do this year — was the most newsworthy work we’ve done and probably ever will do,” said Ms. Kapoor, a senior who intends to remain in journalism once she starts college at Princeton University.

Ms. Kapoor helped prepare the Pulitzer entry in January, submitting The Eagle Eye’s work in the prize categories for public service and breaking news after exploring whether student entries were barred from the competition. (They are not.) True to form for journalists conditioned to operating on deadline, the Parkland students started compiling the entry two days before it was due.

The Eagle Eye editors realized that an entry of 17 obituaries and a range of stories about student activism against gun violence would be atypical fare for the Pulitzers, which tend to reward major investigative reporting and sublime feature writing. So they included a note telling the judges that their work was important because it offered a distinct perspective of the students’ trauma following the massacre.

“I was very happy that they took us seriously,” said Dara Rosen, a 17-year-old junior and copy editor. “It’s really difficult, but at the same time, really empowering to be able to write, from an insider’s perspective, what your school is going through and what is happening.”

No one on staff was forced to cover the shooting, yet many of the editors volunteered to write the obituaries themselves.

“At first, I was very hesitant of taking on that role,” said Leni Steinhardt, 17, who wrote the obituary for Alyssa Alhadeff, 14. “I was really thinking, ‘If God forbid anything happens to me, I would want the right person to write my obituary.’”

Students also had to contend with the grim realization that The Eagle Eye, which has received numerous scholastic journalism accolades and even published a book compiling the newspaper’s work after the shooting, attracted so much attention because of a deadly tragedy.

“I don’t feel I deserve to be doing this at the expense of 17 people,” Ms. Steinhardt said. “But Falkowski always reminds us that we’re doing this for them. I’d rather it be us telling the story than some other news reporter who doesn’t really have a connection to them like we do.”

In a sobering accounting of the biggest news of 2018, three Pulitzers were awarded Monday to newspapers for their coverage of three separate mass shootings in Parkland, Pittsburgh and Annapolis, Md. The staff of The Sun Sentinel of South Florida won the most prestigious prize, for public service reporting, for its work in Parkland.

Last year, The Sun Sentinel reprinted The Eagle Eye’s memorial issue and inserted it into its newspaper, bringing the students’ work to tens of thousands of local subscribers.

“We’re just so impressed by them,” Julie Anderson, the editor in chief of the Sun Sentinel, said on Tuesday.

The previous day, the staff of The Sun Sentinel — much like the students — had gathered around a bank of televisions to watch the Pulitzer announcement. When The Eagle Eye was honored, The Sun Sentinel newsroom broke out into sustained applause.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/us/pulitzer-parkland-stoneman-douglas-eagle-eye.html