2026 Pulitzer Prize Remarks: Audio

STEVEN GINSBERG:

Good Afternoon. I'm Steven Ginsberg, the Executive Editor of The Athletic.

I want to start by thanking David Perpich, who is the best boss anyone could ever hope to have; the rest of the Sulzberger family; and Meredith, who is The Athletic's biggest fan, for their commitment to high-end quality journalism - and especially sports journalism.

Our goal at The Athletic is to do revelatory reporting in an engaging way, which is why we were so excited to partner with Pablo Torre last year.

Since launching "Pablo Torre Finds Out" nearly three years ago, he has developed a well-earned reputation as an investigative reporter willing to ask hard questions and speak truth to power. He has also pioneered an approach to investigative journalism that has resonated with new, younger audiences.

In September, Pablo broke a blockbuster backed by hundreds of pages of internal documents, compelling interviews with people inside companies and additional extensive reporting. Pablo revealed that Steve Ballmer, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, had improperly paid the star player Kawhi Leonard $28 million to essentially do a no-show job where he could just pocket the money.

Over the next few episodes, Pablo's reporting broadened to include Leonard's uncle, and additional reporting that showed damning evidence of what Ballmer had done.

The story consumed the sports world and led to an investigation by the N.B.A. into whether the payment to Leonard was tantamount to the Clippers circumventing the league's sacred salary cap. That investigation is ongoing.

And I'm sure Pablo is going to find out what happens there, too.

I want to thank Jesse Burton, who oversees podcasts at The Athletic; Craig Custance, who runs our creative development department; and the great Mike Semel, our standards editor and head of our editorial quality, for their work with Pablo.

And mostly, I want to thank Pablo for the work he's done and this richly deserved award.

PABLO TORRE:

It is a surreal honor to address the galactic senate as the representative from an outer-rim planet in your network. And I am thrilled to be invited to celebrate a day full of recognition. That is mind blowing. I knew you guys were good, but today is really one of those days where it feels like I'm lucid dreaming.

Part of this, I mean … frankly, because I'm from New York City - born and raised here, first-generation American, parents from the Philippines - I grew up reading and subscribing to The Times. And I've seen documentaries in which you guys do this thing, and it's even better when you get to do this thing as a part of it, it turns out. And that is in large part due to the support and the relationships that we've benefited from just in a year, less than a year of partnership with you guys.

So thank you to Steven, to David Perpich, to Jesse Burton, to Craig Custance, to Mike Semel, to Seb Tomich, to Meredith, to A.G., to Carolyn Ryan, who's been such a great encourager of my work. To be a show in this network, The Athletic's network, and to be connected to The New York Times Company broadly, is an honor in and of itself. And I hope the bona fides of the documentaries I've watched can validate that fact.

If you talk to some of the folks who helped make our very weird show what it is … and I've just got to shout out "The Protocol." I mean, what incredible work that they did. On a topic that we deeply care about and find vitally important. It is crazy to me that I get to follow the acts that you've heard, so to speak, and be in their company.

But if you talk to the folks who make our weird show what it is, and some of them are here today - Chris Tumminello; Matt Sullivan; Bimal Kapadia; my friend Dan Le Batard down in Miami, who founded Meadowlark Media - they will tell you that this painfully sincere appreciation of journalism began at conception.

What we wanted to do, from the very beginning, was bet on the value of reporting in a sea of … not. And the value of our foremost obligation being to the principle of public interest is the thing that I find as a key element of our kindred spirit here. One of the things, though, that I've learned in the course of making this show is that sincere veneration of journalism's principles can coexist with experimentation around journalism's form, and I don't claim to have figured out everything far - far from it.

Just ask the N.B.A.

But in producing this series about the Clippers and a carbon-credits company and the N.B.A., we thought a lot about how reporting is presented and communicated and designed for new audiences.

And as it turns out, these audiences, who may not realize at first blush … that they actually share those same principles of many of the people in this room today - the principle of reporting without fear or favor - and have all along. And maybe they have actually believed in that all along.

And that has helped, in part, because the way we do our show … we bring friends, expert witnesses like David Samson and Amin Elhassan who opened manila folders and read financial statements and synthesize the testimony of corporate whistle-blowers.

And it has been incredibly energizing to learn that if you believe that reporting can be both fun and important, an audience of sports fans might actually agree.