Populist Managing Editor Wins Pulitzer Prize

Art Cullen, managing editor of The Progressive Populist, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing at his day job, as editor of The Storm Lake (Iowa) Times (4/10). Art won for “editorials fueled by tenacious reporting, impressive expertise and engaging writing that successfully challenged powerful corporate agricultural interests in Iowa,” which include the Koch organization, Cargill, Monsanto and the Farm Bureau and their secret funding of local governments’ defense in a major environmental lawsuit by the Des Moines Water Works. The municipal water utility sued three counties in northwest Iowa over nitrate runoff from farms that pollutes the Raccoon River, which is a source for Des Moines’ water supplies. The Iowa Supreme Court ruled in favor of the defendant counties that the utility can’t win damages in the lawsuit and a federal judge in Sioux City in March dismissed a similar federal lawsuit.

“Art has attacked local farmers, lawyers, county supervisors, Monsanto, the Koch Brothers, agribusiness and the Republican Party — all icons in northwest Iowa,” Richard Longworth, a retired Chicago Tribune reporter and foreign correspondent who has chronicled the changing Midwest economy in recent years for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, told James Warren of the Poynter Institute.

“He called Sen. (Charles) Grassley, an Iowa institution, ‘nothing more than a lapdog for the Republican establishment,’ and the other Iowa senator, Joni Ernst, ‘the only woman as vulgar as Donald Trump,’

“Art’s Pulitzer is virtue rewarded,” Longworth said. “Sometimes the good guys really do win.”

The twice-weekly Times, whose circulation is approximately 3,000, has been published since June 1990 in Storm Lake, Iowa, population 10,000. The Times also handles circulation, printing and mailing of The Progressive Populist, which has been published since November 1995. John Cullen is publisher of both publications.

See the 10 editorials that were cited in the award.

See also, "In a small Iowa town, a Pulitzer-winning editor defends immigrants and tries to bring a community together" from the Los Angeles Times.

See a report from a nearby daily newspaper. the Carroll Daily Times Herald.

See another report from James Warren of the Poynter Institute.