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Plant City Native Wins Journalism Award

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By GEORGE WILKENS | The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 9, 2008

PLANT CITY Plant City native Anne Hull, a Washington Post reporter who helped expose mistreatment of wounded war veterans, is this year's recipient of the Lovejoy Award.

The award conferred Sept. 28 at Colby College in Waterville, Maine is named for alumnus Elijah Parish Lovejoy, an abolitionist newspaperman killed in Alton, Ill. in 1837 while defending his press from a pro-slavery mob.

A five-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, Hull was part of the three-member team that won the prestigious award this year for meritorious public service for a series on the mistreatment of war veterans at Walter Reed Hospital, Bethesda, Md.

Hull also covered the 9-11 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina and has written on race, immigration, class and the war in Iraq.

Of special local interest, she authored "The Strawberry Girls," an article about the Florida Strawberry Festival queen and her court published in August issue of The New Yorker magazine. Her research was done at the Plant City Photo Archives in downtown Plant City, as well as throughout the community.

The Lovejoy Award selection committee chair, former Chicago Tribune editor Ann Marie Lipinski, called Hull "an extraordinary journalist, one of the finest of her generation."

Hull was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and is a two-time recipient of the Newspaper Editors' Distinguished Writing Award. She was a 2007 recipient of the Batten Medal for coverage of the Iraqi war and impacts on American soldiers and their families.

The descendant of Donald and Emma Hull, early settlers in the Hopewell community, she is the niece of Donna Hull Jones of Plant City.

Hull worked for the St. Petersburg Times for 15 years and was the paper's national correspondent from 1995 to 2000. At The Washington Post she is a national staff reporter.

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