The latest episode of The Journalism Salute features an interview with Connecticut Mirror reporter Ginny Monk, who along with her colleague Dave Altimari and Sophie Chou and Haru Coryne, formerly of ProPublica, just won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting. This was for a series exposing issues in Connecticut's towing laws that overly favored the tower and treated the towed terribly. The impact of the reporting was that Connecticut made significant changes to its laws to address the issues.
We talked to Ginny about that series as well as a story she wrote a couple of years ago about foster adoption and the rights of both birth parents and foster parents. She is a native of the small town of Pencil Bluff, Arkansas and a graduate of the University of Arkansas.
This excerpt from the interview has been edited for clarity and length.
How did the series of stories originate?
So two things happened at once, and it was lucky that Dave and I were both in the same- newsroom at the time. He had gotten a tip from a longtime source saying, "You need to look into this issue of towing, and particularly the sales of vehicles." And around the same time I was talking with members of a tenants' union in Hamden, Connecticut, who were saying, among their other complaints and problems with management, that their cars were being towed from their homes and sold. And that was just for things like they didn't have the proper parking permit or something along those lines Sometimes even smaller things like they were parked crooked, or once someone didn't clear snow off of his windshield quickly enough and the towing company couldn't see the parking permit that was very much there and towed it.
We discussed the reporting on this story at length, as Ginny walked me step-by-step through what she and Dave did. That included this response …
What’s something else you did?
We launched a community engagement journalism effort. We made flyers and used police data to figure out some of the top locations where people were towed from, and just went around the state handing out flyers. We talked to more than 100 people from that effort.
We were actually at a lot of the apartment complexes where people were being towed from, A couple gas stations, places like that, but mostly at apartment complexes, just going door to door.
How did people receive you?
It's always a mixture when you show up at people's homes. There were a couple times someone worked night shifts, and I accidentally woke them up during the day, so they were not so pleased with that. But, I think by and large the people who had been towed, and there were a lot of them, wanted to talk about their experience because it's frustrating for folks when they get towed, especially when they get towed from their homes.
What has the impact of all of the reporting been?
Just after our first story published, I think it was 24 hours later, lawmakers started to say, "We're gonna do something about this issue." Which for me was the quickest response to a story that I've published that I've ever seen. And then they did come in during the legislative session, did a huge overhaul to the law, kept working on it throughout the year, and came back this session and passed another law introducing more consumer protections. That got final passage the day the Pulitzers were announced.
What was the collaboration process with ProPublica like, both in terms of the data analysis that they did, and also I noticed there's neat artwork on most of the stories too that it looks like they did?
We worked really closely with their data team. Sophie and Haru did wonderful work and just work that I did not know how to do. A lot of scraping, a lot of coding. We received 11,000 documents and we needed a way to go through those that was not just reading them and entering them by hand into a spreadsheet, because that introduces a lot of opportunity for human typos and errors. So we had to have some safeguards against that, and Sophie and Haru put those in place.
What's the process of doing the writing like for you?
I do an outline first. I almost never end up liking it once it's written, and then I go back in and make a lot of changes. Some of the folks in my newsroom will make fun of me for this, but I have on a few occasions, written the story, printed it out, cut every sentence apart, and then just rearranged them in a giant chaotic pile until I have them in the order that I want them.
I think when you work on a project for so long, you have so much information in your brain that what you wanna do is put all of it on the page. For me, when I print it out and cut it apart, I can say, "Oh, wait. This was boring," or, "Only you care about this, Ginny."
Another process thing. You had a sentence in the story about after birth father.
The sentence was, "But when he find out, found out his girlfriend was pregnant, Misterio said he tried to get sober but had setbacks." Then there was a comma, and you wrote "As there are with many sobriety journeys."
I can think of many stories that I've read over the last years that would not have included what you included after the comma, "as there are with many sobriety journeys." Why did you include that in that sentence?
Talking to him about his sobriety journey, it was very clear to me, from the moment he found out his girlfriend was pregnant, that he loved his daughter and wanted good things for her. I did some reading and some research on sobriety and how frequently people have these setbacks, and just about everyone has them. I thought two things. One, I don't want people to read this story and get a false sense that sobriety is straightforward and just one straight path. And two, I didn't want his daughter to read it one day when she got older and think, "My dad didn't love me enough to get sober," because of something that I wrote.
That's a very thoughtful thing to do.
Her feelings were very important to me in writing this story.
What was your reaction when you found out you won the Pulitzer?
It took me a long time to absorb it. I found out and then I just had to go back to working. It was strange. I didn't really know what to do with myself. I called my mom. A lot of folks from Arkansas (congratulated her). I made the third fact on the Pencil Bluff, Arkansas Wikipedia page, so I'm quite satisfied.
Have you learned anything recently that is particularly valuable to how you do your job?
I think over the last few years I've learned that I do my job better when I'm rested and healthy and not too stressed out. I think early in my career, and I think a lot of journalists do this, they work themselves to the bone. And I'm not saying I don't work hard or that people shouldn't work hard, but I work so much better when I finish at a reasonable hour and don't think about work and take my breaks.
What's the most important thing for a young journalist to know about entering the profession right now?
It's such a tough market right now. I think the thing to know is that what employers care about is clips, whether you can do the work. I get applications and questions from young journalists for our internship program who sometimes have never written for their student publication or for another paper, and it's really hard to get a job if you haven't done those things.
Question of the Week
A few weeks ago I asked journalists to share stories of the most notable things they covered for their student newspapers. I shared some in the last issue. Here are three others, all of which were quite serious.
“A shooting on campus. Two dead in dorm room. Location of shooter unknown. We heard a street address over a police radio and bolted over there. Parked a block away and crept to perimeter. Waited with long lens. Shooter turned gun on self. Got pics of sheet-covered gurney. Tense, very late night. Happens too frequently today, but was pretty rare in 1992.”
-Shelley Lynn Gennaro, graduate of Indiana University, high school journalism teacher
“I worked for the Texas A&M Journalism department when Bonfire fell in ‘99. I was also at the A&M/Texas Bonfire game with The Aggieland, our yearbook. I covered how the newspaper handled it and interviewed the Dean of Engineering the day it fell and they were recovering people.”
-Abby White
“This investigation (link and link) about the closing of a program to train anesthesia nurses at Qunnipiac took me four months to complete, and it was one of the first investigations I did. It exposed me to working with sources on background and FOIA. The story went from having nothing on the record and getting a PR response to getting things on the record via FOIA and having both sides suddenly wanting to go on the record with you, including the provost who called on a Sunday night to chat, because we were going to print no matter what. After that, more people stepped forward to talk about the pattern”
-Chatwan Mongkol
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In 2025 we had a new episode each week and featured more than 60 guests. I don’t know that we were the most diverse journalist interviews podcast out there, but we certainly tried to be.
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A reminder to professors and teachers
You can find episode guides that you can use if you wish to integrate the podcast within your classroom. There are more than 50 available. Each one has suggested questions for discussion and activities a class can do.
I’m also happy to help you find an episode that would be appropriate for what you’re teaching. Reach out to me at [email protected].
Additionally, I’ve curated some of the 2025 episodes into groups. If you’re teaching a class or unit in any of these subjects:
- Investigative Journalism
- Feature Writing
- Covering government policy
- Social justice, immigration, and identity
- Local News
Check out the sets of episode guides that would be useful to you. I don’t have a good term for them, so I’m borrowing from Bluesky and calling them “Starter Packs” - sets of 5-8 episodes in each category that may be useful in your classroom.