City Bureau, Invisible Institute and Chicago author Jonathan Eig awarded Pulitzer Prizes

The two Chicago-based nonprofit journalism organizations garnered the Local Reporting prize on Monday for the “Missing in Chicago” series, and Invisible Institute won a second Pulitzer for audio reporting. Eig’s ‘King: A Life’ won in the Biography category.

A joint investigation between two Chicago newsrooms, including one that began as a volunteer-run startup less than 10 years ago, and a biography on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. by a local author have been awarded journalism’s highest honor.

City Bureau and Invisible Institute were awarded the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting on Monday for the “Missing in Chicago” series by Sarah Conway, senior reporter at City Bureau, and Trina Reynolds-Tyler, data director at the Invisible Institute. The seven-part investigation, which stemmed from Reynolds-Tyler’s work leading data science project Beneath the Surface that analyzed open missing persons cases in Chicago, was published in November. The other finalists in the Local Reporting category included Mississippi Today and The New York Times and staff of The Villages Daily Sun in Florida.

Invisible Institute’s audio team — Yohance Lacour, Sarah Geis, Erisa Apantaku, Dana Brozost-Kelleher, Bill Healy and Alison Flowers, with editorial support from Jamie Kalven — also received a Pulitzer Prize in Audio Reporting with USG Audio for its series that revisited a 1990s Chicago hate crime.

Chicago author Jonathan Eig won in the Biography category for “King: A Life,” sharing honors with Ilyon Woo, author of “Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom.”

“The Pulitzer Prize is every journalist’s dream,” Eig told the Sun-Times. “You can do great work your whole career and deserve one and never get lucky enough to get one, so it’s an unbelievable honor.”

‘Missing in Chicago’ series sheds light on handling of missing persons cases

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