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UA alums Paul Giblin and Ryan Gabrielson will discuss investigative reporting at a free public forum.

By Kate Harrison, UA School of Journalism
September 14, 2009

Two alumni of the University of Arizona's journalism program who won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting in April 2009 will meet with classes at the School of Journalism and deliver a public lecture.

Paul Giblin, a 1988 graduate of the UA School of Journalism, and Ryan Gabrielson, who took classes in the school and wrote for the Arizona Daily Wildcat, will discuss "Investigative Reporting and the Pulitzer Prize" on Thursday, Oct. 8, at 7 p.m. in the Education Building, Room 211. The event is free and open to the public.

Giblin and Gabrielson wrote an award-winning five-part series on what the East Valley Tribune described as "slower response times on emergency calls, a dropping arrest rate and, for a time, excessive overtime costs" in the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office. Their project, "Reasonable Doubt," unearthed many of the ways in which the MCSO's intense focus on immigration resulted in the faltering enforcement of other crimes.

The journalists spent six months investigating thousands of documents for the series, which was published by the East Valley Tribune. Giblin now is the co-founder of The Arizona Guardian, a subscription-based news site that focuses on Arizona politics and government. He is a journalist with 24 years of experience as an editor, columnist and reporter in Arizona, Hawaii and New Mexico. Giblin has covered federal affairs, immigration, politics, business and sports.

Gabrielson is an investigative reporting fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, for the 2009-2010 school year. During five years at the East Valley Tribune, he covered higher education, law enforcement, politics and city, state and federal government. He began his career at The Monitor, a daily newspaper in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, covering corruption and border issues.

The Pulitzer committee said Giblin, Gabrielson and the East Valley Tribune deserved the award because of "adroit use of limited resources to reveal, in print and online, how a popular sheriff's focus on immigration enforcement endangered investigation of violent crime and other aspects of public safety," according to the Pulitzer Prize Web site.

The series also won the George Polk Award for Justice Reporting, the Best of the West first place award for investigative reporting and the Arizona Press Club's Don Bolles Award for investigative reporting.

The work also was selected as a finalist in the Investigative Reporters and Editors contest. In addition, the project was featured on the national PBS television show "NOW on PBS" and on the PBS site "Exposé: America's Investigative Reports."

Gabrielson and Giblin are not the only former UA students to win the Pulitzer.

• Nancy Cleeland, a 1977 graduate, was a lead writer on a 2004 series for the Los Angeles Times about Wal-Mart's labor policies and sourcing practices that won both the Pulitzer and Polk awards;
• UA journalism graduates Frank Sotomayor '66 and Jose Galvez '72 were part of a team of editors and reporters, also for the Los Angeles Times, that won the Pulitzer for Public Service in 1984 for an in-depth examination of southern California's growing Latino community. Virginia Escalante '71, a UA education major and journalism minor, also was part of that LA Times' team;
• Ernest Sotomayor '77 was part of an editing team at New York Newsday that won a 1992 Pulitzer for Spot News Reporting on a subway crash that killed five people.
• In addition, Terry Wimmer, who joined the UA journalism faculty in 2006, led an investigation of fertility clinics for the Orange County Register that won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.