Four Chipsters among The Seattle Times staffers who win the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news

Four Chips Quinn Scholars, all alums of the Summer 2006 class, have won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for their online roles in The Seattle Times’ team coverage of the killing of four police officers last fall and the ensuing 40-hour manhunt.

Stephanie Clary, Michelle Ma, Sona Patel and Joe Ruiz are on the staff that was awarded the prize in the breaking news category for the paper’s print and online coverage of the Nov. 29, 2009 killings and the aftermath.

Was it just coincidence that the CQS Web site featured the four Pulitzer Prize-winning Chipsters in our March 15 "Where in the World" series -- or did the Universe know what events were about to unfold?

All four CQS alums work in the paper’s online department. Clary and Ruiz are associate producers for seattletimes.com, while Ma is a resident producer and Patel is a social media producer.

The prizes were announced Monday. The Pulitzer committee cited the paper’s “comprehensive coverage, in print and online,” of the story.

David Boardman, the paper’s executive editor, was quoted as telling The New York Times that the story coverage “was a test of our new tools and techniques of reporting online,” including the use of Twitter. “Every bit of news we got, we held nothing back from the Web for the print edition.”

Ruiz described in an e-mail how the four Chipsters handled the coverage duties in the days following the Nov. 29 shootings: “One of the ideas we tried that ended up getting some coverage after the fact was our trial of Google Wave as a collaborative effort. Stephanie Clary led that.

“The Monday after the shootings was Sona’s first day on the job and she jumped right in to handling the social media work,” Ruiz continued. “Michelle Ma worked on various sections of the site during the coverage, and I did homepage work, first-day Twitter work and wrote Web updates on the following days.”

The prize-winning effort reflects how a journalist’s sense of professionalism and obligation to readers and viewers trumps any personal response to the news being covered.

“Our Web team and the entire newsroom weren’t immune to the shock generated by the terrible tragedy of the officer slayings,” Ma said in an e-mail. “Our aim was to get accurate, comprehensive information to our readers and community. For the Web, that meant making the most of our everyday tools, as well as trying new methods to capture the fast-moving story. It tested our endurance as journalists and required the best-public service journalism we could muster.”

The growing list of Chipsters who have been part of Pultizer Prize-winning team coverage includes Rick Jervis (CQS 1993) while at The Miami Herald; Hector Becerra (1997) of the Los Angeles Times; Kristen Go (1996, 1997), Sheba Wheeler (1995) and Curtis Esquibel (1999) while at The Denver Post for coverage of the Columbine massacre; and Seth Prince (1999) of The Oregonian for copyediting a project on the Immigration and Naturalization Service that won in the public service category in 2001.

Ruiz said that receiving journalism’s most prestigious award is “one more reason we’re all thankful for the chance to be CQ Scholars.”

To read The Seattle Times’ story about winning its most recent Pulitzer Prize, click here: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2011591908_pulitzer13m.html