I hereby nominate every working journalist for a 2021 Pulitzer prize.

Several years ago, when YouTube and other social media was just on the rise, Time Magazine made “you” its Person of the Year and put a mirror on its cover. It was cheesy, but just clever enough to make it remarkable, and it will forever be among Time’s most historic fronts.

The Pulitzer board ought to do something similar with its 2021 round of awards and give its coveted Public Service medal to every newspaper still open during the coronavirus pandemic.

The pandemic is the most significant global event since World War II, affecting every community from coast to coast to coast, if not with infections, then with economic turmoil, if not with economic turmoil, then with fear.

Everyone’s covering the story, and there’s no way to pick just one standout, because nobody can possibly do a better job covering the effects of the virus on a community than the newspaper serving that community.

The Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal can’t be matched on their coverage of Donald Trump’s and Congress’s success and shortfalls in the pandemic battle, but no one can best The Alpena News in detailing the specific fallouts here.

For weeks now, I have watched my reporters sweat and toil through story after story chronicling the way our businesses, our hospital, our governments, our residents have been hurt by this virus, how they’ve fought through. We’ve written about the specific places local residents can get tested, the specific charities to which local residents and businesses can turn for aid, the specific nursing home being ravaged by the virus. Lifestyles Editor Darby Hinkley has contributed to the Ogden Newspapers COVID-19 Reporting Team, bringing to Alpena news of the COVID fallout from around the country, and news from Alpena to the country.

But we can’t match the Jackson (Michigan) Citizen-Patriot for its coverage of the effect on Jackson County. We can’t tell the stories told by the Lewiston (Idaho) Tribune or the Casper (Wyoming) Star-Tribune or the Perry (Oklahoma) Daily Journal or the Biloxi (Mississippi) Sun Herald.

Each of those papers are giving their readers information they need to survive, and no one can possibly do that better than them.

And those journalists can only do that work by going out into the public that health experts tell them to avoid, by standing near to the throngs of protesters ignoring social distancing while yelling in statehouses. Journalists put themselves at risk of contracting the disease every single day.

Unlike World War II, this history is clobbering newspapers’ bottom lines, gutting newsrooms through layoffs and furloughs and forcing some newspapers to close outright at the same time those newspapers are needed more than ever.

The Great Recession took its toll on newsrooms, but that was like long, drawn-out trench warfare. This is carpet-bombing. Blitzkrieg.

My friend won a Pulitzer this year.

Matt Mencarini led the Lansing State Journal’s coverage of the Larry Nassar tragedy and is the best journalist I know, writing with empathy and edge, wit and warmth. He’s since moved on to the Louisville Courier-Journal and was part of the team that won a 2020 Pulitzer in Breaking News for its coverage of hundreds of last-minute pardons issued by the Kentucky governor.

He was on unpaid furlough this week when he found out he won.

That’s the environment in which journalists are performing such stellar work on the virus. They have to suck it up, no time to mourn their friends who are laid off or furloughed, no time to worry that they might get sick, doing the work of two or three people because they have to pick up the slack caused by the cuts, doing the people’s work.

Each and every paper that stayed open through all that, each and every journalist who kept pushing through all that, deserves to hang that Pulitzer gold medal on their wall.

Justin A. Hinkley can be reached at 989-358-5686 or jhinkley@thealpenanews.com. Follow him on Twitter @JustinHinkley.

ONLINE

Visit pulitzer.org/news/announcement-2020-pulitzer-prize-winners for the complete list of 2020 winners and links to the winning stories.