Mike McIntire
Ridgefielder and New York Times reporter Mike McIntire was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize with colleague Walt Bogdanich.
They were recognized for what the Pulitzer committee described as “stories exposing preferential police treatment for Florida State University football players who are accused of sexual assault and other criminal offenses.”
McIntire and Bogdanich were finalists for the Pulitzer in National Reporting, a $10,000 prize awarded this year to Carol D. Leonnig of The Washington Post “for her smart, persistent coverage of the Secret Service, its security lapses and the ways in which the agency neglected its vital task: the protection of the President of the United States,” the Pulitzer committee said.
The other finalists in that category were Marisa Taylor, Jonathan Landay and Ali Watkins of McClatchy Newspapers “for timely coverage of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA torture, demonstrating initiative and perseverance in overcoming government efforts to hide the details.”
The series on Florida State football by Bogdanich and McIntire also won a national Associated Press Award for Best Investigative Sports Reporting.
McIntire was also a member of the New York Times team that won a Pulitzer in 2009 for coverage of the downfall of New York Gov. Elliot Spitzer.
McIntire said the four-story series that nearly got another Pulitzer this year began with work by Bogdanich.
“My partner, Walt, began with two stories examining how rape allegations against athletes at two schools were mishandled, and I joined him for two additional stories that took a broader look at how the authorities in Tallahassee, Fla., failed to pursue crimes involving FSU football players,” he said.
“The stories had wide impact and drew attention to the power and influence of big-time sports programs on college campuses and in the communities that host them.”
McIntire, who grew up in Ridgefield and Wilton, began his career in journalism working at The Press’s sister paper The Wilton Bulletin in 1985.
Before joining The New York Times in 2003, he was the investigative editor at The Hartford Courant, where he shared a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of a mass shooting at the Connecticut Lottery headquarters, and was a Pulitzer finalist for investigative reporting on medical malpractice.
His investigation of dangerous conditions at nuclear power plants earned him a National Press Foundation Award, and he received the Scripps Howard Foundation National Public Service Award for exposing political corruption in Connecticut.
McIntire teaches investigative reporting at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.
He lives in Ridgefield with his wife, Maggie, daughters Meghan and Lauren, and son Ryan.