Jeffery Gerritt // Diederich College of Communication // 探花视频

Director, O'Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jeffery Gerritt has more than 30 years鈥� experience as an investigative reporter, editor, columnist, editorial writer, and editorial-page editor at the Detroit Free Press, USA Today, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Toledo Blade, and the Green Bay Press-Gazette.

He has reported from Tanzania, Brazil, and Cuba, as well as from Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza as a columnist for the Detroit Free Press. In 2022, Gerritt spent six weeks in Ukraine, covering the refugee crisis as the editorial-page editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Much of Gerritt鈥檚 work has focused on prison, criminal justice, and urban issues, including mass incarceration, poverty, drugs, addiction, and homelessness. His 2020 Pulitzer Prize honored a series of investigative editorials exposing the needless, often horrific, deaths of prisoners in Texas county jails.

Gerritt has won more than 80 other national and state journalism awards, including five National Headliner Awards, five medallions from the national Society of Professional Journalists, two Scripps Howard Awards, two Unity Awards from Lincoln University, a Burl Osborne Editorial and Opinion Award from the News Leaders Association, Carmage Walls Prize for Commentary, Batten Medal, Distingquished Alumni Award from the University of Wisconsin, and a special citation from the Michigan Coalition for Human Rights.

A former jazz and rock drummer, Gerritt earned a B.A. degree from the University of Wisconsin in philosophy and music and a master鈥檚 degree in journalism from 探花视频, where he also worked as a night security guard at O鈥橠onnell Hall.