Tom Brune

Education: Northwestern University, BSJ; University of Maryland, MA

When I came to Washington, D.C., to cover the Justice Department in 1999, the post-impeachment Clinton administration was winding down, the hyper-partisanship in politics had started to surge, and the U.S. Senate career of New York’s Chuck Schumer had just begun.

I have learned many ways to seek answers – quizzing officials and authorities; digging into records and documents, and old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting.

Since then, I’ve covered a generation’s worth of news: 9/11 and terrorism; civil liberties and civil rights; political scandals; judicial nomination battles; presidential appointments; campaigns and elections; impeachments, and lots of government spending. Along the way, I covered Schumer’s rise as the first New Yorker to become Senate majority leader.

The road to becoming a journalist covering Washington began in middle school in Houston, when my Reading Writing and Spelling teacher referred me to the school’s newspaper sponsor. As a fledgling reporter, I quickly grasped the power of asking questions.

Since then, I have learned many ways to seek answers – talking to the people who know what’s going on; quizzing officials and authorities; digging into records and documents; collecting and analyzing data for trends and outliers, and old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting.

My career has taken me from Chicago, a great news town where I worked at The Chicago Reporter and Chicago Sun-Times, to the Seattle Times, where my series on affirmative action was honored as a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, to Newsday, where I’m now the Washington bureau chief.

Honors and Awards: More than two dozen local, regional and national awards, including finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 1999.