Two Ball State journalism graduates were each part of teams that were awarded the Pulitzer Prize on Monday.
Aric Chokey, a 2015 Ball State journalism graduate, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service, and Dan Swenson, a 1995 Ball State journalism graduate, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting.
Chokey, a native of South Bend, Indiana, was part of a writing team at the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel that covered the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida.
According to a press release, Chokey was one of the first reporters on scene at the school when the shooting occurred on Valentine's Day 2018. He then continued to report on the shooting in the next few months including covering breaking news, funerals, rallies and school walkouts.
The team that Chokey was on won the prize for its efforts to explain "how 17 people could be murdered in a school considered one of the safest in Florida," according to the press release. The report from the Sun Sentinel exposed the failures of the school district, law enforcement and social services.
"Bittersweet seemed to be the word of the day yesterday after the Pulitzer was announced because of how tragic of a story this was," Chokey said in the press release.
Dan Swenson, native of Marion, Indiana, and graphics editor for the Advocate in New Orleans, Louisiana, was part of a team "that examined the state’s discriminatory conviction system, including a Jim Crow-era law, that enabled Louisiana courts to send defendants to jail without jury consensus on the accused’s guilt," according to the press release.
Swenson won two other Pulitzer prizes in 2006 for his work at the Times-Picayune which won awards in breaking news and public service for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina.
Erika Espinoza and Stephen Beard, Ball State journalism alumni, won a Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting in 2018 for her work within teams at The Arizona Republic and the USA Today Network that examined the U.S.-Mexico border and President Donald Trump's pledge to build a border wall.
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