As a reporter and now editor of the Washington Post’s rapid-response investigations unit, Emma Brown, M.J. ’09, has garnered several major headlines since President Trump first took office in 2017. Last year, she was part of the team that won the Breaking News Reporting Pulitzer for coverage of the assassination attempt on then-candidate Trump in Pennsylvania. In 2021, she helped unveil what happened during the January 6 insurrection—work that won the Post another Pulitzer. And in 2018, she broke the story of sexual assault allegations against then–Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Colleagues praised Brown’s empathy in researching that piece, which required gaining the confidence of informant Christine Blasey Ford. Earlier in her career, Brown was an education reporter, a U.S. Forest Service ranger, and a middle school math teacher
in Alaska.
At 8:27 a.m. on August 27, 2025, shots rang out at the Annunciation Catholic Church and School in Minneapolis. By 10:15 a.m., the staff at the Minnesota Star Tribune, led by editor Kathleen Hennessey, M.J. ’04, had confirmed the deaths of two children in the mass shooting, which also left 21 injured. Their subsequent body of work won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News. No stranger to on-the-ground reporting (or to Minnesota, where her family is from), Hennessey previously led a team of national Associated Press reporters who lived in the places they wrote about. A gifted political editor and reporter, she spent most of her career in Washington, D.C., where she covered the Obama administration and Trump’s first term in the White House for outlets including the New York Times.
Susie Neilson, M.J. ’19, a science writer turned investigative reporter and self-proclaimed “data person,” became a Pulitzer finalist in 2025. This year, the San Francisco Chronicle staffer shared the prize in Explanatory Reporting for exposing how insurance companies leave California wildfire survivors without the means to rebuild their homes. Neilson combed through thousands of pages of records and found that the state’s largest companies were knowingly using faulty algorithms to set inadequate coverage limits. Maggie Beidelman, M.J. ’13, aided as a visuals editor. In her spare time, Neilson mentors Berkeley Journalism students in the Investigative Reporting Program. Being recognized by the Pulitzer Prize Board, she told the J-school, has left her with “the increased confidence that I can take big swings.”
Contributing to the Star Tribune’s win this year was Andy Mannix, M.J. ’15. Upon being hired by the paper in 2016, Mannix focused on “cops, courts, and prisons,” later joining the paper’s investigations team. In 2020, he coauthored a piece on how the death of George Floyd exposed a long-standing culture of misconduct in the Minneapolis Police Department. Mannix’s story helped the Star Tribune win the 2021 Pulitzer for Breaking News Reporting and the prestigious George Polk Award in 2020. Earlier this year, Mannix made the move to ProPublica, where he remains committed to accountability journalism in the region. “The flurry of recent national news out of Minneapolis is just the latest indicator of how critical the Midwest is to understanding the changing story of America.”
Across China, people deemed troublemakers can’t leave their homes without their every move being watched. How does the government keep an eye on them? Garance Burke, M.J. ’04, MPP ’05, along with four others at the Associated Press, won the Pulitzer in International Reporting this year for revealing the surprising answer: China largely built its surveillance system on technology purchased from companies based in the U.S. What’s more, they discovered, the U.S. Border Patrol monitors drivers with the very same technology and, relying on predictive policing, detains those with “suspicious” travel patterns. Video producer Serginho Roosblad, M.J. ’18, contributed to the investigation. Burke, who in addition to the J-school also studied at Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, received the GSPP alumni award for Exceptional Leadership in Policy and Journalism in 2018.
ProPublica national desk reporter Brett Murphy, M.J. ’16, is no stranger to the Pulitzer, bestowed annually by Columbia University. In 2024, he shared the Public Service prize for revealing that some Supreme Court justices received lavish gifts, which led to the court adopting its first-ever code of conduct. He received his first Pulitzer nod in 2018, becoming a finalist for a USA Today series on the exploitation of port truckers—reporting he began at the Berkeley J-school. Mentored by faculty, Murphy uncovered numerous labor violations committed against the predominately immigrant workforce, including pressuring employees to sign contracts without translation and locking gates to force them to work overtime. Murphy credited the bravery of his subjects, who he said “risked everything to tell us their story.”