NewsBeat

14 NewsBeat May/June 2017 Tiny, family-run newspaper wins Pulitzer Prize for taking on big business f you know Art Cullen, it's not exactly a surprise to learn his initial words upon watching the livestream of the Pulitzer announcements and learning he'd won for editorial writing. "Holy shit," he yelled out to his brother, John, the publisher of the family-run, 10-person Storm Lake (Iowa) Times. The only surprise was that there wasn't a longer string of un-family-like adjectives or adverbs. Big-paper editorial writers, perhaps laboring in well-appointed individual offices in relative urban splendor, be apprised: Writing editorials is merely one of a multiple daily duties of Art Cullen, Monday's Pulitzer Prize winner for editorial writing. Sitting in an office he calls a "gray metal wreck," he's de facto city editor, part-time reporter and editorial writer at the twice-weekly, 3,000-circulation Storm Lake, Iowa Times. He won for editorials that confronted the state's most powerful agricultural interests, which include the Koch Brothers, Cargill and Monsanto, and their secret funding of the government defense of a big environmental lawsuit. His "tenacious reporting, impressive expertise and engaging writing" were quite self-evident if you've seen his labor (which actually spanned two years, though he won for last year's efforts). But he cranked those out while functioning as a de facto city editor, part-time reporter and editorial writer. He lays out the main news pages and used to run the press until printing was moved to Sheldon, Iowa, an hour away. "Journalism really matters, and good journalism is being done all around the country," Cullen, 60, said Monday. "Art has attacked local farmers, lawyers, county supervisors, Monsanto, the Koch Brothers, agribusiness and the Republican Party — all icons in northwest Iowa," says Richard Longworth, a retired and esteemed Chicago Tribune reporter and foreign correspondent who has chronicled the changing Midwest economy in recent years for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. "He called Sen. (Charles) Grassley, an Iowa institution, 'nothing more than a lapdog for the Republican establishment,' and the other Iowa senator, Joni Ernst, 'the only woman as vulgar as Donald Trump,'" "Art's Pulitzer is virtue rewarded," Longworth said. "Sometimes the good guys really do win." Storm Lake is an 11,000-person, immigrant-filled meatpacking town in northwest Iowa. The winters can be snowy and dreary. Politically, there are many Trump supporters even though his actions and declarations on immigration remain a source of consternation. For example, 88 percent of the elementary school kids are of color, with 75 percent Latino, and a total of 21 languages are spoken, Cullen said. So he does his various jobs while joined in the effort by John and his wife, Mary; his wife, Dolores, and their son, Tom, who helped with reporting those winning editorials. And there's his family's dog, Mabel (or "Mabel the News Hound," as he calls her), who hangs out at the newspaper offices most of the time. Cullen is a passionate fellow who speaks candidly about how Storm Lake's immigrant workforce has been exploited as cheap labor for the slaughter of hogs and the manufacture of ethanol out of the corn-rich environs. As he characterizes the overriding economic reality: "So we ship in Mexicans to slaughter hogs because we've put them out of business with NAFTA and are shipping everybody all our finished corn and pork, polluting the river in the process." The river at the center of his prize- winning entry is the Raccoon, which is a primary water source for Des Moines and part of an intense environmental fight. I By JAMES WARREN

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