Houston Chronicle named finalist for 2023 Pulitzer in opinion writing
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Houston Chronicle editorial writers Monday were named finalists for a 2023 Pulitzer Prize in opinion writing for a series of editorials about the Uvalde school massacre.
Editorial board members Lisa Falkenberg, Joe Holley, Nick Powell and the late Michael Lindenberger were honored for their work for helping Texas readers understand the mass shooting that killed 21 people, including two teachers and 19 elementary school students.
“Writing about gun violence in Texas is hard, sometimes demoralizing work,” Falkenberg said. “Change is too slow in coming. But how will change ever come if opinion journalists aren’t out there beating the drum, saying the names of victims, repeating the names of victims, elevating their families’ pleas for stronger gun laws?”
She said Uvalde families and allies travel to Austin weekly to demand that legislators raise the age to purchase semi-automatic weapons. “Lawmakers who oppose that effort just want them to go away,” she said. “They won’t. We won’t, either.”
Powell said progress can be slow.
“It’s a weird topic to win for because there’s nothing really to celebrate,” Powell said.
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Powell said he took some comfort from the news Monday that a bill that proposing a higher age limit on buying assault-style weapons had passed out of a state legislative committee, hours before a deadline that would have killed the measure.
“Today with the news that the raise the age bill was vote out of committee, I felt like I could smile for this,” Powell said.
The Chronicle team wrote seven editorials that were submitted to the Pulitzer board for its consideration. The editorials criticized Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the police response to the tragedy and called for legislators to take meaningful steps on gun reform. Over the past year, the editorial board has written more than two dozen editorials on Uvalde, gun control and related topics.
The Miami Herald won the Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing for a series of editorials on the failure of Florida public officials to deliver on promised taxpayer funded amenities.
The Chronicle has won two Pulitzers, most recently in 2022 for a series of editorials on voter suppression in Texas. Falkenberg, the Chronicle’s vice president and editor of opinion, won the paper’s first prize in 2015 for commentary.
Falkenberg leads the editorial board as well as the paper’s opinion and outlook sections. Raised in Seguin, she joined the Chronicle staff in 2005.
Powell joined the Chronicle in 2017 as its Gulf Coast reporter and reported on the Santa Fe High School shooting, the global race for a COVID-19 vaccine and Galveston’s delays in rebuilding public housing after Hurricane Ike. Before joining the Chronicle, Powell worked as an opinion writer and editor at City & State NY.
Holley, a Waco native, has been the newspaper’s “Native Texan” columnist since 2013. Holley was also an editorial writer from 2012 to 2017. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2017 for a series of editorials on gun control and the Texas gun culture and was part of the team of Pulitzer winners in 2022, for editorials on former President Donald Trump’s “Big Lie.” Holley also wrote a book about the Sutherland Springs mass shooting.
Lindenberger was the former Chronicle deputy opinion editor and was mostly the editorial page editor of the Kansas City Star. He died in December. He joined the Chronicle in 2018 after 14 years at the Dallas Morning News. He also wrote and edited for The Courier-Journal in Kentucky and was a teacher, public speaker and graduate of the Louis D. Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville.
New York Times writer Kathleen Kingsbury was also named a finalist for editorials on the “existential threat of terror and violence committed by right-wing political extremists.”
john.ferguson@houstonchronicle.com