A nationwide collaboration led by Stanford’s Big Local News and Stanford University Libraries contributed to a 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting, awarded to Alissa Zhu, Nick Thieme, and Jessica Gallagher of The Baltimore Banner, working in partnership with The New York Times Local Investigations Fellowship.
Their investigative series examined the devastating toll of Baltimore’s fentanyl crisis, with a focus on older Black men. The Pulitzer committee praised the reporting as “a compassionate investigative series” that revealed the crisis’ full scale and disproportionate impact, and highlighted a statistical model that The Banner shared with other newsrooms.
With support from the New York Times’ Local Investigations Fellowship and Big Local News at Stanford, the awardees’ Senior Overdoses Project investigated an anonymized dataset from the Centers for Disease Control that tracked every fatal overdose circa 1968-2022.
Their work identified a cohort effect – an elevated overdose rate among Black men born between 1951 and 1970 in Baltimore and dozens of U.S. counties.
The collaborative scope of the project was evident when eight newsrooms simultaneously published local stories showing how Baltimore became the drug overdose capital of the country. Each story also highlighted the different factors at play in their own impacted communities.
“Together, the Banner, Big Local News, and the Times summarized the data findings for the newsrooms, held many regular virtual meetings with them, fact-checked the data analysis, built visualizations, and became the beneficiaries of some impressive local reporting from Boston and Washington, D.C., to San Francisco,” said Cheryl Phillips, a Hearst Professional in Residence at Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences (H&S).
“This work spearheaded a national conversation about America’s opioid epidemic,” she added.
Phillips founded and co-directs Big Local News with Serdar Tumgoren, the Lorry I. Lokey Visiting Professor in Professional Journalism. Their initiative, based in the journalism program in the Department of Communication, helps journalists store, share, and publish data via the Stanford Digital Repository, which is operated by the Stanford University Libraries. “The repository is an essential platform for collaboration both within and beyond Stanford,” said Michael A. Keller, the Ida M. Green University Librarian. “Congratulations all around!”
“For us here at Big Local, this is the proof of the premise behind the founding of Big Local News,” Phillips and Tumgoren said in a joint statement. “Sharing data, analysis, and accountability journalistic work will only amplify that work for the good. We talk a lot about lowering the cost of accountability reporting, through better use of data and algorithms. This project did just that.”
This work spearheaded a national conversation about America’s opioid epidemic.”
Cheryl PhillipsHearst Professional in Residence at the School of Humanities and Sciences
At the Stanford University Libraries, Regina Lee Roberts, head of the Social Sciences Resource Group, and Geoff Willard, media production coordinator at the Stanford Media Preservation Lab, helped archive data for the Senior Overdoses Project.
“It’s exciting when a Big Local News story is primed for release. Their work is consistently illuminating and important,” said Willard. “We released the data in the wee hours of the morning as the simultaneously published stories went to press on the East Coast.”
“Seeing that this data preservation matters on a national scale is deeply satisfying,” said Roberts. “Over the years, we’ve developed a strong collaboration with Big Local News, grounded in a shared commitment to preserve the information, data, and evidence that fuel investigative reporting at both local and national levels.”
“Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies 8,180 acres, among the largest in the United States, and enrols over 17,000 students.”
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