Pulitzer-winner Caitlin Dickerson brings stories of journalism’s mark on history

Update: The lineup for this week’s “Stories that Matter” panel has changed. The panel will include Pulitzer Prize-winners Caitlin Dickerson of The Atlantic, Anna Wolfe of Mississippi Today and Nicole Carroll, former editor in chief of USA TODAY and executive director of NEWSWELL.

Award-winning reporter Caitlin Dickerson took papers from a huge stack and spread them across the floor of her Brooklyn apartment. 

Hidden inside the files — calendar invites, email exchanges — she knew there were pieces of a story. She had spent years fighting for the government records. 

Now, in 2021, she had finally gotten her first trove of documents. 

And it was a mess.

“It was a huge stack of paper. It was completely out of order, and it spanned three or four years of a timeline of events,” she said. 

But those events were crucial. They were the decisions that led federal officials to separate children from their migrant parents at the southern border.      

So Dickerson spread the files out on the floor and began putting them in order. She was creating a permanent record for history, and one that eventually would lead to journalism’s top honor. 

That topic will help drive the conversation Feb. 13 at a public forum at San Joaquin Delta College in partnership with Stocktonia. 

The event brings Dickerson and two other journalists — all honored by the Pulitzer Prizes — together for a community conversation about local news, national politics and the future of journalism. 

For Dickerson, the road to that kind of reporting began a decade earlier. But she hadn’t originally intended to become a journalist at all. 

As an undergraduate, she was preparing for law school, not journalism. Her classes required that she read a lot of news — The New York Times, The Economist and others — and then connect current events to the concepts and history she was studying. 

The experience sparked an interest.

“I wanted to know how the writers I was reading put their stories together, started thinking about who they chose to interview and what kinds of questions they asked,” Dickerson said. “I felt drawn into stories about subjects that I didn’t know anything about previously, or that had nothing to do with my life.”

So in 2011, after graduating from Cal State Long Beach with a degree in international studies, she headed to an internship at NPR. 

Almost immediately, she said, she could see how hard her new colleagues were working to help people understand what was happening in the world, and what an important role they were playing. 

“I pretty much knew right away that I was going to stick with journalism,” she said. 

Though she started work in the fundraising department, Dickerson contributed to a project called the Intern Edition, which allowed her to make connections and hone her writing skills. Her editors noticed, and she was put on news. 

On the investigations desk at NPR, Dickerson and her team won the 2015 Peabody award for their series on how secret mustard gas tests during World War II had singled out American soldiers for painful testing based on the color of their skin. 

After NPR’s reporting, a new federal law required officials to reassess the claims of those who had been affected by the testing and previously denied benefits. 

“It showed me, very early in my career, just how much of an impact journalism can have,” Dickerson said. 

To her, the story also mattered because of the community it reached. 

“I heard from relatives of vets who were exposed to mustard gas,” she said, “their children and grandchildren, who never knew.” 

Moving to The New York Times, Dickerson’s background in international studies led her to a subject that would command national attention: immigration. 

Her reporting aimed to humanize migrants, with stories about claims they were forced into unnecessary surgeries and misinformation that had personally affected them.

Dickerson said immigration stories were always at risk of devolving into caricatures. “I think it’s really important nowadays that journalists develop the tools to be able to report on marginalized groups,” she said.

She moved to report for The Atlantic, and continued a fight for records that had begun at The Times, examining the history of the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant parents from their children.

Much of the information was obtained through lawsuits and public information requests. 

And when she finally won a fight over records, the results were daunting. When the first documents arrived, she spread them across her apartment floor. Then she started building a timeline. 

Once she had the files in order, she scanned them into a digital archive.

“Then I started to do interviews, and when I would learn more about a particular moment in the timeline, I would make a note of it and add it to the digital chronology.” Dickerson said. “I anticipated that it was possible that lots of people I interviewed would not be honest — they might not remember everything that I was asking about — so it was important for me to have that chronology handy so that I could push back in interviews in real time.”

In August 2022, “We Need to Take Away the Children” was published in The Atlantic, an unflinching look at the decisions that led to the family separation policy. The article chronicled eight years of changing border enforcement policy. 

Just as with the reporting on mustard gas, she said, the goal of the story was to create a record of what really happened — and who was responsible. 

“Sometimes creating a historical record is the most powerful thing that you can do,” she said.  

Scott Stossel, national editor at The Atlantic, said Dickerson’s reporting held officials accountable in ways that hadn’t happened before. 

“She still captured the terrible human impact on the families, but by focusing on the figures in the first Trump administration who orchestrated this policy, she was able to capture the combination of chaos and intentional cruelty that characterized it,” Stossel said. 

Next week, Dickerson will join fellow journalists Anna Wolfe and Nicole Carroll in Stockton for the Pulitzer on the Road discussion with Marjorie Miller, administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes. 

They will weigh modern journalism’s role in holding power to account, including on immigration issues — like the timeline of events Dickerson meticulously built. 

“Those documents will exist for future generations to review,” she said. “They’ll exist for kids who were separated from their parents when they’re adults.” 

“I can’t anticipate everything that archive will be used for,” she added, “but I know that it’s important that it exists.” 

Zackary Kirk-Newton is a student journalist at San Joaquin Delta College.

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