Megha Rajagopalan of BuzzFeed and Neil Bedi of Tampa Bay Times Win Pulitzer Prizes for Reporting

BuzzFeed News journalist Megha Rajagopalan, along with two other contributors — Alison Killing and Christo Buschek — won the Pulitzer Prize for innovative investigative reports that exposed a vast infrastructure of prisons and mass internment camps secretly built by China for detaining hundreds of thousands of Muslims and other minority ethnicities in its restive Xinjiang region. Rajagopalan’s Xinjiang series won the Pulitzer Prize in the International Reporting category.

She is among two Indian American journalists who won America’s top journalism award on June 11.  Tampa Bay Times investigative reporter Neil Bedi won for local reporting. Bedi, along with Kathleen McGrory has been awarded the prize for the series exposing the misuse of authority by a sheriff’s office initiative that used computer modeling to identify people believed to be future crime suspects. About 1,000 people were monitored under the program, including children. 

“What Kathleen and Neil unearthed in Pasco County has had a profound impact on the community,” Mark Katches, Times executive editor, told the Press Trust of India. “This is what the best investigative journalism can do and why it is so essential.” Their reporting revealed “how a powerful and politically connected sheriff built a secretive intelligence operation that harassed residents and used grades and child welfare records to profile schoolchildren”, the Pulitzer Board said. Bedi, who has a degree in computer science, is now a Washington-based reporter for ProPublica.

According to a BuzzFeed News report on the awards, Rajagopalan and her colleagues used satellite imagery and 3D architectural simulations to buttress her interviews with two dozen former prisoners from the detention camps where as many as a million Muslims from Uighur and other minority ethnicities were interned. 

Rajagopalan, who had previously reported from China but was barred from there for the story, travelled to neighboring Kazakhstan to interview former detainees who had fled there, BuzzFeed said. “Throughout her reporting, Rajagopalan had to endure harassment from the Chinese government, which had persisted beyond forcing her to pack up her apartment in Beijing on short notice,” the prize entry read., as per the BuzzFeed News report. “At one point, the Chinese government posted her personal information, including a government identification number, on Twitter.” The series of stories provided proof of Beijing’s violation of Uighurs’ human rights, which some U.S. and other Western officials have called a “genocide.”

In 2017, not long after China began to detain thousands of Muslims in Xinjiang, Rajagopalan was the first to visit an internment camp – at a time when China denied that such places existed, BuzzFeed News said. “In response, the government tried to silence her, revoking her visa and ejecting her from the country,” BuzzFeed News wrote in its entry for the prize. “It would go on to cut off access to the entire region for most Westerners and stymie journalists. 

The release of basic facts about detainees slowed to a trickle.” Working from London, and refusing to be silenced, Rajagopalan partnered with two contributors, Alison Killing, a licensed architect who specializes in forensic analysis of architecture and satellite images of buildings, and Christo Buschek, a programmer who builds tools tailored for data journalists. “The blazing Xinjiang stories shine desperately needed light on one of the worst human rights abuses of our time,” Mark Schoofs, editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, said in a statement.

Minutes after she won, Rajagopalan told BuzzFeed News she wasn’t even watching the ceremony live because she wasn’t expecting to win. She only found out when Schoofs called to congratulate her on the victory. “I’m in complete shock, I did not expect this,” Rajagopalan said over the phone from London. She said she was deeply grateful to the teams of people who worked with her on this including her collaborators, Killing and Buschek, her editor Alex Campbell, BuzzFeed News’ public relations team, and the organizations that funded their work, including the Pulitzer Center. 

Rajagopalan also acknowledged the courage of the sources who spoke to them despite the risk and threat of retaliation against them and their families. “I’m so grateful they stood up and were willing to talk to us,” she said. “It takes so much unbelievable courage to do that.” The three of them set out to analyze thousands of satellite images of the Xinjiang region, an area bigger than Alaska, to try to answer a simple question: Where were Chinese officials detaining as many as 1 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities? For months, the trio compared censored Chinese images with uncensored mapping software. They began with an enormous dataset of 50,000 locations. Buschek built a custom tool to sort through those images. Then, “the team had to go through thousands of images one by one, verifying many of the sites against other available evidence,” BuzzFeed News wrote in its prize entry.

They ultimately identified more than 260 structures that appeared to be fortified detention camps. Some of the sites were capable of holding more than 10,000 people and many contained factories where prisoners were forced into labor. The groundbreaking technological reporting was also accompanied by extensive old-fashioned “shoe leather” journalism. Barred from China, Rajagopalan instead travelled to its neighbor Kazakhstan, where many Chinese Muslims have sought refuge.There, she located more than two dozen people who had been prisoners in the Xinjiang camps, winning their trust and convincing them to share their nightmarish accounts with the world.

This is the 105th year of the Pulitzer Prizes awarded by a board at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York recognizing the outstanding work. Pulitzer prizes are awarded yearly in twenty-one categories. In 20 of the categories, each winner receives a certificate and a $15,000 cash award. The winner in the public service category is awarded a gold medal.