UIS Alumna Kathy Best helps lead The Seattle Times to another Pulitzer Prize

The Seattle Times Editor Kathy Best has worked for some of the best newspapers in the country.

On Monday, she delivered the news to her team that The Seattle Times had been awarded the industry’s highest honor - the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news for its coverage of the fatal landslide in Oso, Washington, which took the lives of 43 people in March 2014.

Best is quoted in the Times as saying, “This is bittersweet because 43 people lost their lives. However, I’m incredibly proud of the way The Seattle Times staff covered the tragedy. We asked hard questions and we provided information to a community that needed it.”

This is the third time Best has helped the paper earn a Pulitzer Prize- also for breaking news in 2010 and investigative reporting in 2012.

Best graduated from the University of Illinois Springfield in 1990 with a master’s degree in Public Affairs Reporting. She has been an editor at The Seattle Times since 2007 and previously was an assistant managing editor at The Baltimore Sun, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. 

Best’s 35-year journalism career began in 1980 with the Quad City Times, on the Mississippi River, along the Illinois-Iowa border. Best did two stints at the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the first as a Washington, D.C. reporter, later returning to be assistant managing editor.

She was the 2013 UIS Commencement Speaker.