You Too Can Write Like a Pulitzer Prize Winner

After winning a Pulitzer Prize last week, Susie Neilson said she was “so over the moon and grateful for the recognition.”

The rest of us can be grateful, too, for the writing lesson in explanatory journalism offered by Neilson and the rest of the team at the San Francisco Chronicle. Let’s also recognize how we can make our writing better by studying what makes terrific writing so good, even examples far from our experience as corporate communicators.

Text versions of the winning stories can be found on the 2026 Pulitzer Prizes for Journalism. We’ve included links to the stories we mention. Some winning publications had opened the paywall on their stories so that readers can appreciate the stories’ presentations.

Here’s a few of the lesson we’ve found:

1. Show how things work. Two months after the Palisades Fire, the Chronicle published a seven-part investigation into how insurance companies systematically write policies that undervalue properties, leaving thousands of California homeowners without enough cash to rebuild after a disaster. The investigation was many months in the works before the historic fire.

The series, by Susie Neilson, Megan Fan Munce and Sara DiNatale, could have been eligible for an Investigative Reporting award. Instead, it won for Explanatory Reporting because how each installment defined complex terms and made the insurance business understandable. Here’s the start to an “explainer” story, published alongside the 6,300-word primary report, called a “mainbar.”

Is Your California Home Underinsured? Here’s How to Find Out — And What to Do About It
San Francisco Chronicle
April 2, 2025

Most homeowners think their insurance policies will offer full protection if they lose their houses in disasters. But that belief may be misplaced. A Chronicle investigation found that many California policyholders are underinsured, meaning they would not receive enough money to rebuild a home similar to the one that was destroyed.

Homeowners can reduce the likelihood of finding themselves underinsured by following these steps: …

Why it works
Every communicator should be keenly interested in this Pulitzer category because every communicator should have the explainer story in their toolkit. We’ve published an 11-step guide to help you report and write them.

The headline to the Chronicle story start begins with a question that most people would answer with, “I don’t know.”

The “hed,” as it’s called in some newsrooms, then promises to direct the reader to next steps. “How/Why” heds work well atop explainer stories, as we’ve recommended, citing no less an authority than The Wall Street Journal.

The first sentence expands on the question: Most people think they have enough insurance.

“But that belief may be misplaced,” the story goes, a light touch of understatement considering the 6,000 words spent revealing the widespread problem.

2. Go back to the beginning. The Washington Post won in the Public Service category for its coverage of President Donald Trump’s overhaul of the federal bureaucracy. Twenty-one reporters wrote 15 stories over the year, starting on Jan. 31, 2025. Hannah Natanson, whose home was searched by the FBI in January, had the most bylines.

This story, published near the end of the series, sums up the coverage. It combines a detailed timeline of events with a series of short profiles of former federal employes. Here’s how it begins:

The Year Trump Broke the Federal Government
How DOGE and the White House carried out a once-unthinkable transformation of the nation’s sprawling bureaucracy
By Hannah Natanson and Meryl Kornfie
Dec. 21, 2025

A State Department worker watched on television as President Donald Trump, hours into his second term, signed executive orders that halted relocation flights for Afghan refugees — which her office existed to coordinate. She wondered: What would happen now?

A Veterans Affairs staffer in that agency’s equity office watched Trump sign another document, this one outlawing diversity programs, and thought, “It’s over.” And in a Social Security building, a woman wandered over to her co-worker’s desk worried about Russell Vought, Trump’s pick for budget director. Vought said he wanted to put federal workers “in trauma,” she pointed out, and would soon decide which agencies to cut and by how much.

“It isn’t easy to fire federal employees,” her co-worker told her. “We have all these protections. We’ll be okay.”

He was wrong. The United States’ 2.4 million federal employees were about to get caught up in a once-unthinkable overhaul of the nation’s sprawling bureaucracy, carried out in less than a yearby one of the most polarizing presidents in American history.

Why it works
Ordinarily, you start a story in the middle of things, with the most important action that best represents the whole story. What came before will be background to the main action. What came after will in the story be a look to the future.

To identify that important action, you must master the timeline. Even with a short story, the sequence of events will help you understand and explain what happened. A story editor at The New Yorker used to say, “Chronology is your friend.”

The reporters demonstrate a firm grasp of the timeline. They could have summed up the series with a look at the turmoil at a huge agency such as the Social Security Administration, which it covered in October and again on Dec. 29, 2025.

Instead, the reporters went back to the beginning, to the moment Trump took the oath of office before the employees knew what was in store. But we know what happened, which gives the opening of this story a tragic quality.

The reports also could have started the story with one of the anecdotes slightly expanded. But the three shorter examples have a greater cumulative impact.

Why it works, part 2
The Post story also features a solution for a frequent writing challenge: transitions after quotes.

After a quote, how do you move the story forward? Our focus is usually on what’s coming next, which we then try to dovetail with the quote.

The reporters take a different approach by directly addressing the quote with, “He was wrong.” That sentence signals a transition to a strongly worded sentence summarizing the story, “a once-unthinkable overhaul” of the bureaucracy.

3. Passion project. In the category of Criticism, the Pulitzer Prize Board recognized Mark Lamster, the architectural critic of The Dallas Morning News. Architectural criticism is far removed from the day-to-day experience of communications teams. Yet the energy of Lamster’s columns offer an important lesson. Here are three examples.

A park
In a Jan. 30 column, Lamster outlined the reasons to appreciate a public works project that some residents might take for granted. He began: 

“Can you imagine downtown Dallas without Klyde Warren Park? It’s hard, and that’s saying something, as the 5.4-acre park suspended over the Woodall Rodgers Freeway is just over a decade old. But since its opening in 2012, it has become an essential part of the city’s DNA, the front lawn Dallas never had.”

Why it works
The first sentence, or lede, is conversational. Lamster directly addresses readers and invites them to think along with him.  It is more often used when topics are personal to the reader, such as weight loss or retirement savings. He highlights the irony of a development that is just 13 years old yet an “essential part” of the city. And he evokes emotion by describing the park as “the front lawn Dallas never had.”

Downtown
In a May 30, 2025, Lamster praised a new city program to increase police presence downtown and offer social services and housing to homeless people. He begins this way:

“Are you scared of downtown Dallas? I get it if you are.

“The streets can seem lonely, especially at night. Drivers treat traffic laws as optional, and that’s when they’re not using the streets as a drag-racing strip. Crossing one of the downtown’s potholed thoroughfares on foot can feel like a real-life version of the arcade game Frogger. Homelessness remains a problem, with many of those individuals experiencing mental health issues. Last year saw a disturbing uptick in violent crime in the city’s core.”

Why it works
He empathizes with readers who are uncomfortable downtown, listing the reason why it’s unpleasant. He holds back his view until the third paragraph: “The recently unveiled Safe in the City initiative is an admirable response to the conditions in the Dallas core.”

City Hall
Maybe you can fight for City Hall — the building. Lamster shows us in an Oct. 16 column that begins this way:

“Of all the irresponsible, ill-conceived, short-sighted, counter-productive, cynical, philistine and downright dumb ideas I’ve heard in my time writing about Dallas, the prospect of razing City Hall stands alone. Demolishing architect I.M. Pei’s iconic building would be an act of epic mismanagement indefensible on aesthetic, environmental, financial or moral grounds.”

Why it works
It’s long, 50 words. But this first paragraph features two series that could be a dictionary example of what it means to be of “high dudgeon.” Note how each series condemns the plan in different ways. The first addresses the way the proposal was made. The second goes to the substance.

Why these columns work
What’s the difference between good and great? What makes great employees, managers, leaders or even companies? Often, it’s a passion for what they do. A love of the customers and colleagues. A devotion to the job.

Some people don’t have those feelings. But for many of those who do, the passion is often drained from what they say and write. Sounding “corporate” becomes an excuse for being boring.

If employees feel the emotion, they’ll more often remember the message.

Growing up, Tom Corfman liked to take things apart to see how they worked, a curiosity he applies to writing. Want to learn more about our Build Better Writers program of workshops and one-on-one coaching and editing? Email Tom to set up a free call with him and RCG co-founder and senior partner Jim Ylisela.

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