J-School alumna is member of Pulitzer Prize winning staff

Deanna McLendon, a 1997 print journalism graduate, was part of the news team at The Times-Picayune that won two Pulitzer Prizes for public service and breaking news coverage of Hurricane Katrina.

The news team won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting because of their "courageous and aggressive coverage of Hurricane Katrina, overcoming desperate conditions facing the city and the newspaper."

The Pulitzer Prize for public service was awarded for the newspaper's "heroic, multi-faceted coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, making exceptional use of the newspaper’s resources to serve an inundated city even after evacuation of the newspaper plant."

McLendon stayed in the newspaper's main building throughout the storm until she was forced to escape in a newspaper delivery truck after water rose to about four feet. She was one of the dozen or so editors and designers who set up shop at The Houma (La.) Courier the night of the evacuation, and helped cobble together an eight-page, online-only edition of the newspaper, which featured the work of a skeleton crew of reporters who had remained in the flooded city. She continued to work in Baton Rouge for the next seven weeks.

McLendon joined the copy desk of The Times-Picayune in 1999 where she is a copy editor, wire editor and occasional page 1 editor, as well as a metro section designer.

Additional info about the Pulitzer-winning entries can be found at www.pulitzer.org. A complete archive of Times-Pic stories and page pdfs can be found at www.nola.com.