Julie Cart, a 1980 ASU alumna, won a Pulitzer Prize on Monday for a series of articles she wrote for the Los Angeles Times on wildfires.
Cart is a member of the Cronkite School Alumni Hall of Fame at ASU.
“I won it with a colleague, and we’re very excited and really happy for our newspaper,” Cart said.
The Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism that Cart and her colleague Bettina Boxall won recognizes a notable ability to explain an important and complex subject through writing.
“We were given 15 months to work on this series — that’s a long time,” Cart said.
The series discussed the growth and costs of wildfires, and the first part of the five-part series was published on July 27, 2008.
The series showed “painstaking exploration into the cost and effectiveness of attempts to combat the growing menace of wildfires across the western United States,” according to the Pulitzer Web site.
Cart said she never really thought about winning a Pulitzer Prize, one of the most prestigious awards a journalist can win, until now.
“It seemed so unachievable,” Cart said. “It wasn’t even really a goal.”
She said most journalists just focus on their current project and do that work “diligently.”
“I don’t think you can try to get a Pulitzer. You do the best work you can — ambitious work — something you’re interested in,” Cart said.
She said all the finalists are very accomplished journalists and were just as capable of winning.
“We like to think we won because our work was worthy,” she said.
Cart graduated from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in 1980 as a scholarship track athlete.
She held a ninth-place record for all-time discus distance at ASU and attended the U.S. Olympics trials.
“Getting the full liberal arts education at ASU is invaluable,” she said.
In 1978, she worked as a general assignment reporter for United Press International, while she was still a student.
Cart did postgraduate work at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica after graduation and worked as a reporter for the Pasadena Star News in 1982.
She eventually became a sports writer for the Los Angeles Times and started writing news stories there in 1998.
Her biography and her feature story titled “On the Run No More” appeared in the book “A Kind of Grace: A Treasury of Sportswriting by Women.” The story was about the controversial South African track star Zola Budd.
Reach the reporter at reweaver@asu.edu.