Wesley Lowery

Wesley Lowery (born 1990) is a journalist at The Washington Post. He was a lead on the Post's "Fatal Force" project that won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2016.

Early life

Lowery attended Shaker Heights High School and Ohio University.[1] During college, Lowery was editor-in-chief of the campus newspaper, The Post, and interned at The Detroit News, The Columbus Dispatch, and The Wall Street Journal.[2]

Career

Lowery was a reporting fellow at the Los Angeles Times, then moved to the Boston Globe, becoming a general assignment political reporter in 2013[3] and covered topics including the murder trial of the NFL's Aaron Hernandez, Boston’s mayoral race, and the manhunt for the Boston marathon bombers.[4]

In 2014, the National Association of Black Journalists named Lowery "Emerging Journalist of the Year".[5] Lowery moved to the Washington Post in 2014; The Washingtonian described him in 2015 as the paper's "rising star...a terrific reporter" with a track record for "establishing deep sources, writing colorful solo pieces, and contributing to team coverage."[4]

Ferguson coverage and arrest

In August 2014, Lowery covered the Ferguson protests for The Post. On August 13, Lowery and Huffington Post reporter Ryan Reilly were arrested in a McDonald's. The company said it had not asked for the arrest and journalism groups as well as the Lowery and Reilly's employers condemned the arrests, saying they were, as the Columbia Journalism Review characterized it, "deliberate and unjustifiable attempts to interfere with the press."[6] A year later, shortly before the statute of limitations was set to expire, St. Louis County prosecutors charged Lowery and Reilly with charged with trespassing and interfering with a police officer.[7] In May 2016, prosecutors dropped all charges against Reilly and Lowery in exchange for an agreement the reporters would not sue the county.[8]

Fatal Force project

Lowery was a lead on the Post's "Fatal Force" project,[9][10] a database that tracked 990 police shootings in 2015.[11] At the time, the federal government had no comprehensive, nationwide data on police killings;[12] the most systematic data available came from databases compiled by independent, grassroots organizations like Fatal Encounters, Stolen Lives Project, Operation Ghetto Storm, and Killed by Police.[13] Drawing on these databases as well as local newspaper reports, law enforcement websites and social media, Lowery and colleagues built out the Post's Fatal Force database. The project won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2016,[14] and the Justice Department announced a pilot program to begin collecting a more comprehensive set of use-of-force statistics in 2017.[15]

They Can't Kill Us All

Lowery's first book They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement was published November 15, 2016 by Little, Brown.[16] The book describes the Black Lives Matter movement in the context of U.S. history as well as Lowery's personal history. The Seattle Times listed it as among the fall releases they "can't wait to read".[17] The Boston Globe said Lowery "offers fresh insights into what it means to cover a broad national story about race in a rigorous and sustained way."[18] Noting that Lowery wrote the book at 25, The New York Times said, "His book is electric, because it is so well reported, so plainly told and so evidently the work of a man who has not grown a callus on his heart."[19]

References

  1. ↑ Morona, Joey (April 19, 2016). "Shaker Heights grad Wesley Lowery wins Pulitzer Prize at 25". Cleveland.com. Retrieved 12 September 2016.
  2. ↑ Beaujon, Andrew (3 January 2014). "Boston Globe's Wesley Lowery joins Washington Post". Poynter. Retrieved 13 September 2016.
  3. ↑ Tutwiler, Patrick (January 3, 2014). "Wesley Lowery Leaves Boston Globe for WaPo". Fishbowl DC. Retrieved 13 September 2016.
  4. 1 2 Beaujon, Andrew (2 June 2015). "Why Does Everyone Want Wesley Lowery to Shut Up?". Washingtonian. Retrieved 26 October 2016.
  5. ↑ Becker, George (May 30, 2014). "Reporting his way to recognition: Shaker Traces". Cleveland Plain Dealer. Retrieved 27 October 2016.
  6. ↑ Peters, Jonathan (August 13, 2015). "Why the charges against Wesley Lowery and Ryan Reilly in Ferguson are absurd". Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved 26 October 2016.
  7. ↑ Somaiya, Ravi; Southall, Ashley (10 August 2015). "Arrested in Ferguson Last Year, 2 Reporters Are Charged". The New York Times. Retrieved 26 October 2016.
  8. ↑ Suhr, Jim (May 19, 2016). "Charges dropped against 2 reporters covering Ferguson unrest". AP. Retrieved 26 October 2016.
  9. ↑ Shackford, Scott (18 April 2016). "Influential Washington Post Database on Police Killings Wins Pulitzer". Reason. Retrieved 13 September 2016.
  10. ↑ Mullin, Benjamin (25 March 2016). "How The Washington Post counted the dead, one police shooting at a time". Poynter. Retrieved 13 September 2016.
  11. ↑ Woodruff, Judy (April 19, 2016). "Washington Post honored for deep dive into fatal police shootings". PBS NewsHour. Retrieved 27 October 2016.
  12. ↑ Markowitz, Eric (8 July 2016). "Meet the Man Who Spends 10 Hours a Day Tracking Police Shootings". GQ. Retrieved 27 October 2016.
  13. ↑ Sutton, Kelsey (April 29, 2016). "A grassroots organization feels left behind in a Pulitzer Prize winner's shadow". Politico. Retrieved 27 October 2016.
  14. ↑ Associated Press (April 18, 2016). "L.A. Times wins Pulitzer for coverage of San Bernardino attack". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved 13 September 2016.
  15. ↑ Hernandez, Salvador (October 13, 2016). "Department Of Justice To Start Collecting Data On Deadly Police Shootings". BuzzFeed. Retrieved 27 October 2016.
  16. ↑ "THEY CAN'T KILL US ALL by Wesley Lowery". Kirkus Review. September 17, 2016. Retrieved 20 September 2016.
  17. ↑ Gwinn, Mary Ann (14 July 2016). "11 fall books we can't wait to read". The Seattle Times. Retrieved 27 October 2016.
  18. ↑ Delmont, Matthew (November 11, 2016). "Gripping, fraught account of covering police shooting deaths, Movement for Black Lives - The Boston Globe". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 12 November 2016.
  19. ↑ Garner, Dwight (10 November 2016). "Review: 'They Can't Kill Us All' Tallies the Unarmed Black Men Shot by Police". The New York Times. Retrieved 12 November 2016.
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 12/3/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.