Two Haverford alumni are among this year's Pulitzer Prize winners: Michael Paulson '86, who along with the Boston Globe's investigative team uncovered the Catholic priest sexual abuse scandal, and David Wessel '75 of The Wall Street Journal, who was part of a group of reporters to contribute to The Journal's year-long series on business scandals.
Two Haverford alumni are among this year's Pulitzer Prize winners: Michael Paulson '86, who along with the Boston Globe's investigative team uncovered the Catholic priest sexual abuse scandal, and David Wessel '75 of The Wall Street Journal, who was part of a group of reporters to contribute to The Journal's year-long series on business scandals. The Globe's team won the Pulitzer for public service journalism and The Journal, for explanatory reporting. This was the second Pulitzer for Wessel, who also shared in the Prize with reporters at the Boston Globe where he had worked several years earlier.
Paulson joined the Globe in January 2000 after seven years at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, where he worked as city hall reporter, state house bureau chief in Olympia, and as a correspondent in Washington, D.C. Before that he worked as a political reporter for the San Antonio Light in Texas and as a general assignment reporter at the Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Mass.
Since January 2002, he had spent much of his time as part of the Globe's eight-reporter team covering clergy sexual abuse. The team published more than 900 stories and wrote a book, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church, which was published in hardcover in June 2002 (Little, Brown) and in paperback in March 2003.
In addition to receiving the Pulitzer this year, Paulson and his colleagues have been honored for their work with the Associated Press Managing Editors' Freedom of Information Award, the Goldsmith Prize for investigative reporting, the George Polk Award for national reporting, the Selden Ring Award for investigative reporting, the Taylor Family Award for fairness in newspapers, the Worth Bingham Award for investigative reporting, and The New York Times Company's Punch Sulzberger Award. The group has also won a media award from the Massachusetts Association for the Treatment of Sex Abusers and the Spirit Award for Media Responsibility from Jane Doe Inc., a Massachusetts coalition against sexual assault and domestic violence.
David Wessel '75 has been with The Wall StreetJournal since 1984, first in the Boston bureau and then Washington, where he was chief economics correspondent until his Journal assignment in Germany in 1999.
Wessel also has worked for the Boston Globe, where he shared a Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories on the persistence of racism in Boston, and at the Hartford (Conn.) Courant and Middletown (Conn.) Press.
He is the co-author, with fellow Wall Street Journal reporter Bob Davis, of Prosperity: The Coming 20-Year Boom and What It Means to You, published in 1998 (Times Books), which argued that the next 20 years will be better for the American middle class than the previous 20 years.
A frequent contributor to CNBC, Wessel writes the Journal's“Capital” column, a weekly look at the economy and the forces shaping living standards around the world.
