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1983
The 1983 Pulitzer Prize in Local General or Spot News Reporting went to the Editorial Staff of the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, in the Pulitzer board's citation, "for its courageous and resourceful coverage of a devastating flood in March 1982." It is the only Pulitzer ever won by a Fort Wayne newsroom, and it was won the way the citation says: with four photographers and nine city-desk reporters, the paper published front-page flood coverage for six days, 96 smaller stories and 111 photographs, and filled its pages in the emergency with road closings, emergency telephone numbers, utility shutoff information and food-spoilage guidance; as the water fell it followed with a 24-page special section on preventing the next flood and a poll of residents on how officials had handled this one. The prizes were announced on 19 April 1983, a year after the March 1982 flood that drove some 9,000 residents from their homes — the flood itself, and the sandbag lines that made the city famous for a season, are told in the Events sections. The prize belongs to the staff as a body: the Pulitzer record names the Editorial Staff, not any individual, and the men and women who shared it, photographers Dennis Chamberlin and Carl Hartup among them, carried it afterward as members of that staff.
Sources:
- The Pulitzer Prizes, winner record — "Editorial Staff of Fort Wayne (IN) News-Sentinel," 1983, Local General or Spot News Reporting, with the citation (pulitzer.org).
- The New York Times, "Sketches of Pulitzer Prize Winners," 19 April 1983 — the six days, 96 stories and 111 photographs (copy preserved by the Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana).
- The News-Sentinel's own institutional history, as summarized in the Newspapers section of this history.