Alumna Rebecca Johnson is a 2026 Pulitzer Prize winner

Rebecca P. Johnson (A&S ’23) is part of a more than 75-member Chicago Tribune reporting team that recently won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting. The distinction is a remarkable achievement for an early-career journalist who once expected to become a physician instead.

Johnson graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 2023 with a bachelor’s degree in economics from the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. She joined the Tribune shortly after graduation as a six-month intern and was later hired as a breaking news reporter.

Her path to journalism began unexpectedly at Pitt.

“I’ve always liked reading and writing, but probably the first real interest I had in journalism, to be honest, was watching the show ‘Gilmore Girls’ when I was younger,” Johnson said. “But I never really considered it as a career path until I joined The Pitt News.” 

Like many incoming students, Johnson initially envisioned a very different future.

“When I first started at Pitt, I planned to go to medical school one day,” she said. “Even though chemistry definitely isn’t my forte.”

That changed during the COVID-19 pandemic, when she immersed herself in reporting for The Pitt News, Pitt’s student newspaper, where she worked from 2019 to 2023 and later served as editor-in-chief during her senior year.

One of her earliest stories examined how international students were affected by a federal policy that threatened to force them to leave the country if universities switched to fully online instruction during the pandemic.

“I would say that was a crash course on reporting complex immigration decisions that affect people deeply,” Johnson said.

She also credits former longtime Pitt News adviser Harry Kloman and his daily critiques of the paper’s coverage and writing with shaping her development as a reporter and editor.

At the Tribune, Johnson contributed to “Operation Midway Blitz,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning series documenting federal immigration enforcement raids and their impact on Chicago communities. The reporting followed immigration operations over several months and examined tactics used during the raids.

Johnson said the coverage became an “all-hands-on-deck” effort in the newsroom. She was pulled in because as a breaking news reporter, she would often cover the presence of federal agents in the city’s neighborhoods, along with protests which would sometimes follow.

In early May, Johnson and her colleagues learned of the Pulitzer win together in the Tribune newsroom.

“There was definitely champagne involved,” she said.

In the past three years, she becomes the third Pitt alumnus from the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences to earn a Pulitzer. 

In 2024, Brandon Som (A&S ’02G) earned a Pulitzer Prize in poetry for “Tripas,” a collection of poems about his multicultural, multigenerational childhood home. The same year, Brett Murphy (A&S ’13), part of a team at the nonprofit news organization ProPublica, won the Pulitzer in the public service category of journalism for a series of articles titled “Friends of the Court.”

Photography courtesy Rebecca Johnson