February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Stephen McKinley
A Chicago Tribune journalist with Irish roots has been celebrating this week after she was part of a team of reporters that won the Pulitzer Prize category for explanatory journalism.
But when the news of the victory came through late last month, Louise Kiernan was out of the office with her hands full — not with breaking news, but with Declan, her two-week old son.
Last year, Kiernan was one of the senior writers on a team of over 50 reporters who produced a four-part series about air traffic congestion called "Gateway to Gridlock." The piece included New York City’s notorious La Guardia Airport. She was responsible for combining the material generated by over four dozen reporters into a coherent article, in part one, called "The Longest Day." Chicago Tribune reporters traveled to seven different airports and five air traffic control towers and filed reports from the field, all within the same 24 hour period — Sept. 11, 2000.
The piece kicked off the series by thus giving a slice-of-life snapshot of the horrors facing many people traveling on domestic U.S. air routes. Kiernan’s opening paragraphs graphically described the scene of chaos at Chicago’s O’Hare airport on Sept. 11, a day that saw a major storm test the U.S. air traffic system almost to breaking point.
"There are almost 6,000 people at O’Hare tonight. They are all supposed to be somewhere else," she wrote. "They are stuck here instead, in an airport that once prided itself on being the world’s busiest and now is notorious for making more of its passengers late than any other airport in the country."
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"We knew it was a finalist," said Kiernan, who is 37. "I wasn’t actually in the newsroom as I’d just been on maternity leave with Declan. But we were downtown near the [Chicago Tribune] office just in case we won. Then I was able to head over and celebrate. I was thrilled."
Although her parents came from Belfast, Kiernan herself was born in England, in Weston Supermare. She grew up mostly in Kentucky, after her family immigrated to the U.S., then went to college in Virginia. She has been in Chicago since 1991, and joined the Tribune as an intern in ’92. She has an older son, Conor, and her husband, also Declan, is a reporter with the Tribune as well.
This has not been her first brush with journalistic success. In 1994, she went to Ireland for her first visit, and just happened to be there when the cease-fire was declared — she went to work right away, filing stories for the Tribune from the field. In 1997, she covered Princess Diana’s funeral for the Tribune as well. She received her master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University.
Kiernan had a second article in this year’s Pulitzer Prizes, which ended up being one of two finalists, although it did not win one of the coveted medals for excellence in journalism. That article was about the death of a young woman who was struck by a piece of glass that fell from a Chicago skyscraper, and about the negligence of the building owners in recompensing her family.
The Pulitzer Prizes will be awarded on Thursday May 31 at a Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism luncheon.