Coverage of Kalamazoo River oil spill nets Pulitzer Prize

In case you missed it…

Inside Climate News, a tiny web-based organization located in Brooklyn, won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Enbridge oil spill in the Kalamazoo River and subsequent reporting on the nation’s pipelines.

Inside Climate News reporters Elizabeth McGowan, Lisa Song and David Hasemyer won in the national reporting category.

The trio took top honors in the category for their work on "The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You'veNever Heard Of," a project that began with a seven-month investigation into the million-gallon spill of Canadian tar sands oil into the Kalamazoo River near Marshal in 2010. It broadened into an examination of national pipeline safety issues, and how unprepared the nation is for the impending flood of imports of a more corrosive and more dangerous form of oil.

ICN is only the third web-based news organization to win national reporting honors. The others were highly acclaimed ProPublica and one of the most popular sites on the web, The Huffington Post.

The Pulitzer committee commended the reporters for their "rigorous reports on flawed regulation of the nation's oil pipelines, focusing on potential ecological dangers posed by diluted bitumen (or "dilbit"), a controversial form of oil."

Here’s how the New York Times characterized the ICM Pulitzer win:

“In a sign of the changing news business, an independent nonprofit organization based in Brooklyn, InsideClimate News, won the prize for national reporting for its coverage of dangers posed by oil pipelines.

“… While the board that administers the Pulitzers started including online-only news sites in its awards in 2009, InsideClimateNews.com is by far the smallest of such winners. InsideClimate News described itself as a five-year nonprofit organization financed by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Marisla Foundation and the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment. Its newsroom currently includes only seven full-time journalists.

“David Sassoon, founder and publisher of the news site, said his staff members celebrated on a telephone conference call because they work from their homes.”