On Monday, the online news outlet Lookout Santa Cruz earned the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting. The winning coverage was about the catastrophic flooding and mudslides along California’s Central Coast last January. Less than a dozen staffers make up the organization, which Ken Doctor founded in 2020.
Spirits are high at the Lookout, which beat other contenders, including The Los Angeles Times. “We have these legacy brands that are … 160 years old. … So it has been amazing. We're all on cloud nine. And it's been like riding a tiger the last 48 hours.”
Doctor says the team worked 12-hour days to cover the natural disasters, and the publication is the largest in Santa Cruz County, home to more than 260,000 people.
“It's a really diverse county. Santa Cruz, people know a nice funky university town in the northern end of it. A lot of people live in the mountains. People live in Capitola on the coast, and they live [in] south county … a fast-growing agricultural area.”
He points out that digital tools, including text messaging, helped spread the newsroom’s coverage as the internet went out.
“That's the great thing about digital native journalism, of using those tools to gather and then distribute, and to do it instantaneously, but make sure that it is factually correct. So everything's double-edited here by two editors, and that's really important to this report and everything we do.”
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Prior to founding Lookout Santa Cruz, Doctor spent 21 years at Knight Ridder, which owned papers including The Miami Herald, and worked as a business analyst. After moving to Santa Cruz, he says he saw the lack of local coverage. “I just looked around. I said, ‘This is ridiculous. This is a wonderful community that does not know what's going on because it has a newspaper owned by Alden Global [Capital], which is a hedge fund that had greatly diminished it.”
He continues, “So I put together the model based on everything I had learned as a journalist, as an editor, and as an analyst and said, ‘It can work. It's got to be fiercely mission-oriented and fiercely business-driven. And hugely importantly to this Pulitzer win, it's got to have the right people working for it, both in the newsroom, the editors, the correspondents, and on the business side. We talked about showing up in the community.”