EGN NEWS DESK
When Jamie Kalven met Yohance Lacour in 2017, the 2 males rapidly realized that they had one thing essential in widespread.
Mr. Kalven, the founding father of the Invisible Institute, a nonprofit Chicago newsroom, was working in Chicago’s Stateway Gardens housing growth in 1997 when a vicious hate crime wounded the neighborhood 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 received the Pulitzer Prize for audio reporting.
Mr. Lacour’s podcast received considered one of two Pulitzers this 12 months for the Invisible Institute, a small, crusading newsroom on Chicago’s South Side identified for holding metropolis authorities to account. The different prize, for native reporting, went to the group’s information director, Trina Reynolds-Tyler, who reported an investigative collection 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 finest work.
“It’s gorgeous,” Mr. Kalven, 75, stated in an interview. “I simply stepped out of our workplace, which is in a whole 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 Universal Studio Group. Ms. Reynolds-Tyler shared her Pulitzer with Sarah Conway of City Bureau, a nonprofit newsroom in Chicago.
Incorporated in 2015, the Invisible Institute focuses on high-impact journalism analyzing problems with race, housing and prison justice. It is understood 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 received a landmark 2014 case that resulted within the disclosure of information of police misconduct.
This isn’t the primary time the Invisible Institute has received a Pulitzer. A yearlong investigation into police Ok-9 items with AL.com, the Marshall Project and IndyStar obtained 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 acquired out of jail. Before he met Mr. Kalven, he was contemplating asking his neighborhood newspaper if he may do something, together with enhancing categorized ads. His father guided him towards Mr. Kalven, considered one of his neighbors.
The pair rapidly 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. While most of the info of the case have been identified, the total context — together with the way it affected South Side residents — was largely unexamined.
So Mr. Lacour started the painstaking technique of attempting to trace down individuals accustomed to the hate crime a long time after the very fact. It took years — lengthy sufficient that Mr. Lacour supplied to return a $3,000 stipend he had obtained for a yearlong fellowship, since his work hadn’t been printed when it ended. But Mr. Kalven informed him to maintain digging — “It takes so long as it takes,” he stated — and ultimately they determined to inform the story on a podcast.
“I feel that is the proper medium to inform this story,” Mr. Lacour recalled Mr. Kalven saying. “And I feel that I can see the place your private story ought to be baked into it.”
In 2023, about six years after Mr. Kalven’s first dialog with Mr. Lacour, the podcast debuted. It shed recent mild on Mr. Clark’s assault, drew listeners from across the globe and received a slew of awards, culminating on Monday with the Pulitzer.
Mr. Lacour, 50, stated 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 stated. “It’s actually like your dream come true in a whole lot of methods.”
