DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN — A Brooklyn based news service with a staff of seven earned journalism's top honor Monday.
The Court Street based InsideClimate News won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for its "rigorous reports on flawed regulation of the nation's oil pipelines," the Pulitzer board said.
"It's amazing and it's really important for us as a 5-year-old nonprofit with a staff of seven to get this kind of recognition," said founder and publisher David Sassoon. "It think it will help us a lot to do what we want to do."
Sassoon said he founded the news service, which reports on climate and energy issues, because environmental journalism is "in retreat" at news outlets across the country. "We think it's the story of the century," Sassoon said of environmental news.
InsideClimate News has partnerships with Bloomberg, McClatchy and the Associated Press, and work by its reporters has appeared in the San Diego Union-Tribune and other outlets.
The Pulitzers are awarded annually by Columbia University. Though some of the awards have gone to non-traditional media outlets such as the Huffigton Post and the nonprofit investigative news service ProPublica in recent years, this year's field was crowded with heavy hitters including The New York Times, which won four Pulitzers.
