The Invisible Institute: Balancing accolades and innovation / by kaitlynn cassady

“I feel like I’ve been running a marathon,” says Trina Reynolds-Tyler, the data director at the Invisible Institute.

Reynolds-Tyler, along with her colleagues and reporting partners, has been on the run ever since the Chicago-based nonprofit newsroom made headlines by winning two Pulitzer Prizes and a Peabody award in early May. It’s been a whirlwind of collecting awards, doing press interviews and speaking at conferences to talk about their unique and deeply community-centric reporting process.

The 13-person newsroom is dedicated to human rights reporting and earned their latest awards for two different projects done in partnership with other media outlets. “You Didn’t See Nothin,” a podcast series produced by the Invisible Institute in partnership with USG Audio, earned a Pulitzer and a Peabody for audio investigation and delved into a historic case of a hate crime in Chicago that left deep wounds in the community.

Reynolds-Tyler earned the local reporting Pulitzer for “Missing in Chicago,” an investigation that she co-wrote with Sarah Conway of City Bureau, another non-profit newsroom in Chicago whose founders are alums of the Invisible Institute.

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