Journalists at The Baltimore Banner sued for autopsy reports from Maryland’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. They pored through data and created a dataset other newsrooms could use to do their own investigations.
They also stood on corners, sat for hours in nursing homes and illuminated the people behind the data points.
Alissa Zhu, Jessica Gallagher and Nick Thieme of The Baltimore Banner won the 2025 Frank A. Blethen Award for Local Accountability Reporting in the Poynter Journalism Prizes, and the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting for their work on Baltimore’s fentanyl crisis. The project, which was done in partnership with The New York Times Local Investigations Fellowship, was the subject of the final WriteLane podcast of the year.
Gallagher, a photojournalist, shared what it took to build the relationships that show in the reporting and the photographs.
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