When Jamie Kalven met Yohance Lacour in 2017, the 2 males shortly realized they’d one thing essential in frequent.
Mr. Kalven, the founding father of the Invisible Institute, a nonprofit Chicago newsroom, was working in Chicago’s Stateway Gardens housing improvement in 1997 when a vicious hate crime wounded the group there deeply. And Mr. Lacour helped an area newspaper cowl that story on the time.
With Mr. Kalven’s assist, Mr. Lacour’s recollection of that interval — and the story of his eventual incarceration on a drug conspiracy cost — grew to become the topic of an 11-episode podcast, “You Didn’t See Nothin,” which on Monday gained the Pulitzer Prize for audio reporting.
Mr. Lacour’s podcast gained considered one of two Pulitzers this 12 months for the Invisible Institute, a small, crusading newsroom on Chicago’s South Facet identified for holding metropolis authorities to account. The opposite prize, for native reporting, went to the group’s knowledge director, Trina Reynolds-Tyler, who reported an investigative sequence on lacking Black women and girls in Chicago.
The awards made the Invisible Institute the most important shock of Monday’s Pulitzer Prize bulletins, an annual celebration of the information business’s greatest work.
“It’s beautiful,” Mr. Kalven, 75, mentioned in an interview. “I simply stepped out of our workplace, which is in an entire uproar of pleasure.”
The Invisible Institute, which employs roughly a dozen journalists, is understood for teaming up with different newsrooms to publish its investigations. Mr. Lacour’s podcast was created in partnership with USG Audio, a division of Common Studio Group. Ms. Reynolds-Tyler shared her Pulitzer with Sarah Conway of Metropolis Bureau, a nonprofit newsroom in Chicago.
Included in 2015, the Invisible Institute focuses on high-impact journalism analyzing problems with race, housing and prison justice. It’s identified for its investigations into the native police, together with the 2014 homicide of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by a Chicago police officer, and its combat for presidency transparency; Mr. Kalven gained a landmark 2014 case that resulted within the disclosure of data of police misconduct.
This isn’t the primary time the Invisible Institute has gained a Pulitzer. A yearlong investigation into police Ok-9 models with AL.com, the Marshall Challenge and IndyStar acquired the prize for nationwide reporting in 2021.
Mr. Lacour, who served most of a 10-year sentence, had been a author for his complete life and wished to pursue that professionally when he received out of jail. Earlier than he met Mr. Kalven, he was contemplating asking his neighborhood newspaper if he may do something, together with enhancing categorized commercials. His father guided him towards Mr. Kalven, considered one of his neighbors.
The pair shortly realized that the 1997 assault on Lenard Clark, a Black teenager who was accosted in a white neighborhood, was an enormously essential story that merited revisiting. Whereas lots of the info of the case had been identified, the complete context — together with the way it affected South Facet residents — was largely unexamined.
So Mr. Lacour started the painstaking technique of making an attempt to trace down individuals accustomed to the hate crime a long time after the very fact. It took years — lengthy sufficient that Mr. Lacour provided to return a $3,000 stipend he had acquired for a yearlong fellowship, since his work hadn’t been revealed when it ended. However Mr. Kalven informed him to maintain digging — “It takes so long as it takes,” he mentioned — and ultimately they determined to inform the story on a podcast.
“I believe that is the right medium to inform this story,” Mr. Lacour recalled Mr. Kalven saying. “And I believe that I can see the place your private story needs to be baked into it.”
In 2023, about six years after Mr. Kalven’s first dialog with Mr. Lacour, the podcast debuted. It shed contemporary mild on Mr. Clark’s assault, drew listeners from across the globe and gained a slew of awards, culminating on Monday with the Pulitzer.
Mr. Lacour, 50, mentioned the prize was an emotional one for him, partly as a result of it acknowledged the retelling of such a private story.
“It’s overwhelming,” Mr. Lacour mentioned. “It’s actually like your dream come true in a whole lot of methods.”
