Meet Sanghamitra Kalita, the Indian origin journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize

The winners of the various categories of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize, American journalism’s top honour was announced this week which saw a bunch of young journalists, journalists of colour and a few women journalists finding a mention; including an Indian-American woman journalist no less.

In what is an inspiring moment for the country, 39-year-old Sanghamitra Kalita, the Managing Editor of Los Angeles Times has won a Pulitzer. Kalita, whose parents are Assamese, was born in Brooklyn but was raised in Long Island, Puerto Rico and New Jersey.

She was part of the L.A Times team which won in the Breaking News Reporting category for their coverage of the San Bernardino shooting that occurred on December 2 last year and the terror investigation that followed.

With this win, the L.A Times now are the most frequent winner in the Breaking News Coverage with three mentions. This win also marked the newspaper’s 44^th Pulitzer.



Kalita took over as the L.A Times’ Managing Editor for Editorial Strategy in March last year, barely a few months before the shooting.
Her responsibility at the time of joining was to ‘remake how the newsroom works’ and focus on ‘news forms of journalism’ for a newsy Los Angeles market.

Before this, Mitra was the Executive Editor of Quartz, serving as the site’s founding ideas editor- overseeing the section that was responsible for producing ‘the most popular pieces and redefined commentary for a digital age’ apart from being the force behind Quartz’s launch in Africa and India.

She also worked at the Wall Street Journal from 2008 to 2012 where she directed coverage of the Great Recession, reporting on the housing crisis as a senior writer and launching a local news section for New York City.

Two years before that, Mitra moved to India as a founding editor for Mint, which today is the country’s second largest business newspaper. She has also worked as a reporter for Washington Post, covered the 9/11 terror attacks for Newsday and worked at Associated Press.
She has also authored two books and is at the moment working on her third one. Having received her Master’s from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, Kalita also teaches there.

Her list of achievements doesn’t just stop at that. She has also served as the President of the South Asian Journalists Associating in the past and has won numerous journalism awards, besides finding a place in Folio’s Top 100 Women in Media.

Woah. That is some CV. Congratulations are in order!

We'd also like to take this moment to present our reactions to her achievements in a single gif-




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