The Oregonian wins two Pulitzer prizes
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The public service award honored a six-part series done by a team of four reporters that pointed out problems within the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service, triggered by complaints from passengers detained by INS agents at Portland International Airport.
Tom Hallman Jr. won the feature-writing award for his four-part series about a facially disfigured teen-ager.
Hundreds of Oregonian staff crammed into the company's conference room at noon today, waiting for the list of Pulitzer winners to appear on an enlarged computer screen as bottles of champagne chilled in the background.
As the awards appeared on the screen, Hallman's father wiped tears from his eyes as champagne bottles popped. The award was particularly sweet for Hallman, who has been named a Pulitzer finalist three times, but hadn't won until today.
"I am a product of The Oregonian," said Hallman, who started as a copy boy changing reporters' typewriter ribbons. "This is really where I learned to be a reporter. Great work doesn't come in a vacuum. It comes in an environment with freedom to do the best and freedom to grow."
Hallman's series, called "The Boy Behind the Mask," documented 14-year-old Sam Lightner's months-long ordeal as he underwent extensive and dangerous surgery to remove a mass on his face.
The day the last article ran in the newspaper, Sam suddenly fell into a coma, from which he has since awakened.
The INS series - written by reporters Richard Read, Julie Sullivan, Kim Christensen and Brent Walth, edited by Amanda Bennett and editorialized by Rick Attig - detailed abuses of power by the agency, especially among immigration officials in Portland.
The city had been dubbed "Deportland" by some Asian publications because of reports of unfair treatment of Japanese and other travelers at Portland International Airport. The Oregonian also discovered that immigrants seeking asylum in other states, including California, had been jailed for years without being convicted of a crime.
The series resulted in the early retirement of Oregon INS director David Beebe and a call for a review of INS policy.
"I really want to thank the sources. It took a lot of courage to tell their stories to us. Many had already been through the mill with the INS," said Read, who won a Pulitzer for explanatory reporting in 1999. "It must have been daunting for them to retell their story to reporters."
Bennett, who edited the series, said the Pulitzer validated The Oregonian's reputation as a nationally recognized publication.
"We didn't say, it's a Miami story, it's a New York story. We didn't settle for it being a local story. We took on a big national story, big national players and big local players," she said. "We were speaking for people who were outside the realm of the courts and who can help people like that? Only a newspaper and the people who speak for it."
Oregonian editor Sandra Rowe said the INS series won because the Pulitzer board saw the reporters expanded a local story to a national level. She also said the story won because the series created "real change" in the INS.
"Clearly this was important to this community and this paper was ambitious enough to take it national," she said.
The Oregonian has a paid daily circulation of 350,000 and 450,000 on Sunday.
Read, a member of the INS reporting team, won a 1999 Pulitzer in explanatory journalism for a series that traced a shipment of potatoes from the fields of Eastern Oregon to Asian markets to demonstrate economic globalization.
Hallman has also won the American Society of Newspaper Editors Award, the Ernie Pyle Award and the Sigma Delta Chi award for "The Boy Behind the Mask."
"It is a pride and pleasure to be editor of The Oregonian at this time in our history," Rowe said. "It is phenomenal."