John Sullivan, a senior lecturer at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, didn’t dream of becoming a journalist when he was the youngest of eight children growing up in the north suburbs of Chicago. He says he had trouble finding his place. With the help of an internship at the Chicago Reporter, which covers race and poverty issues, and the example of his older brother, Drew, and a few good teachers and mentors along the way, that all changed—setting him on a path to where he is today—co-winner of a 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
Sullivan and four colleagues at The Philadelphia Inquirer — Susan Snyder, Kristen A. Graham, Dylan Purcell, and Jeff Gammage — spent a year examining violence in Philadelphia public schools following high-profile racialized attacks at South Philadelphia High School in 2009. They conducted more than 300 interviews with teachers, administrators, students and their families, district officials, police officers, court officials, and school-violence experts and dug through reams of records for the seven-part series.
The project, “Assault on Learning,” also produced a searchable online database and has led to major reforms in the school system. It has also led to the ultimate prize for the beleaguered newspaper, which had not won a Pulitzer since 1997.
“This is a story that I wanted to do because it was a really important story, “ said Sullivan, who left the newspaper in 2011 and is now assistant director of Medill Watchdog—an initiative that puts student interns to work on in-depth investigations. “[The Pulitzer] sends a strong message for reporters to work on these issues, even if they don’t think they’re going to have the kind of results that are going to satisfy their peers.”
Sullivan, who has been a journalist for 17 years, including 10 with The Philadelphia Inquirer, has now joined a long tradition in journalism education—seasoned professional journalists working side-by-side with students to create meaningful work. That’s what Medill Watchdog is all about. The initiative, whose tag line is “journalism for public accountability,” is run by director Rick Tulsky and Sullivan.
On April 16, the day the Pulitzer winners were announced, Watchdog interns gathered in a room at Medill to find out if their mentor had won. Cheers and applause broke out when they got the news, says Medill senior Katherine Driessen of Columbia, Md.
“I wasn’t entirely surprised because John is incredible,” says Driessen, who says Tulsky and Sullivan run Watchdog like a newsroom—with ideas flowing and failing, hard work and questions—many questions.
