“Sam Siatta was deep in a tequila haze, so staggeringly drunk that he would later say he retained no memory of the crime he was beginning to commit.” C.J. Chivers’ (now, Pulitzer Prize-winning) story from the NYT Magazine: The Fighter: “The Marine Corps taught Sam Siatta how to shoot. The war in Afghanistan taught him how to kill. Nobody taught him how to come home.”

+ “I lost some friends, but some people don’t understand us, why we would badger county supervisors so that their sugar daddy went away. I said, ‘Because it wasn’t right.’ We felt the public deserved to know who’s paying our bills. We did a lot of groundbreaking news reporting and my son (who’s 24) did most of the heavy lifting.” Poynter on a tiny, family-run newspaper that just won a Pulitzer Prize.

+ Longreads has links to all of the Pulitzer-winning stories.