On October 27, 2018, my adopted home city was thrust into chaos, outrage, and mourning. A white supremacist from Pittsburgh’s southern suburbs opened fire on worshippers during Shabbat services at the Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill, a historically Jewish neighborhood. It was, and remains, the most deadly antisemitic attack in U.S. history.

I was humbled to be tasked with crafting the front page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on the day we learned the names of the 11 people who were murdered that day.

While I was first told, as usual, to use the day’s best photo in my design, I gently pushed back. I told our then-managing editor, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former photo editor for the Associated Press, that I believed the big news of the day — the victims’ names — should be given a stark visual treatment to emphasize the loss of each person, formally commemorate them with a physical object, and draw eyes that lingered on the city’s Monday morning newsstands after a weekend of horror. She agreed.

My initial concept had more of the page in black, with one headline stretched across the bottom and a story below it in widened columns, plus a refer to the second story above the index. Unfortunately, in this era, front pages at the Post-Gazette were subject to extreme control by our notoriously volatile publisher, John Robinson Block, so I made the design concession.

In spring 2019, the Post-Gazette staff learned we had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News for our “immersive, compassionate coverage.”

Awards