Alice R. Crites is a ''Washington Post'' librarian and the researcher on the three-member team that won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. Crites has been a researcher on six different Pulitzer-winning teams at ''Washington Post'', 2006, 2008, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. She is an advocate for the role of researchers and news libraries in the support of journalism, saying "We're cost effective. We're expert searchers.... We not only get information, but also help avoid making mistakes."

Early life and education

Crites is the daughter of an

NIH The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...

cancer researcher and a librarian for the Montgomery County Schools. She graduated from

University of Maryland The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland. Founded in 1856, UMD is the flagship institution of the University System of M ...

, and received an M.A. in English and literary criticism from Carnegie Mellon University. She worked for the

Congressional Research Service The Congressional Research Service (CRS) is a public policy research institute of the United States Congress. Operating within the Library of Congress, it works primarily and directly for members of Congress and their committees and staff on a ...

at the

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library ...

before getting her

MLS Major League Soccer (MLS) is a men's professional soccer league sanctioned by the United States Soccer Federation, which represents the sport's highest level in the United States. The league comprises 29 teams—26 in the U.S. and 3 in Canada ...

from the University of Maryland.

Career

Crites started as a weekend worker at the ''Washington Post'' in 1990 and was hired full-time in 1992. She specializes in research and reporting on government and politics; she has covered elections since 1994. Her writing has appeared in the ''Seattle Times'' and ''Washington Post'' She worked with the ''Post'' print news library, the News Research Center, which included approximately "7,500 books, 30 periodicals a month and 15 daily newspapers." In more recent years, she's used

computer-assisted reporting Computer-assisted reporting describes the use of computers to gather and analyze the data necessary to write news stories. The spread of computers, software and the Internet changed how reporters work. Reporters routinely collect information in dat ...

as well as many specialty databases to pursue her work, noting in 2007 that some material—U.S. senators' legal defense fund documents, for example—could still only be accessed in person. Part of Crites' work investigating Senate candidate

Roy Moore Roy Stewart Moore (born February 11, 1947) is an American politician, lawyer, and jurist who served as the 27th and 31st chief justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama from 2001 to 2003 and again from 2013 to 2017, each time being removed fr ...

involved combating misinformation that was being disseminated by

Project Veritas Project Veritas is an American far-right activist group founded by James O'Keefe in 2010. The group produces deceptively edited videos of its undercover operations, which use secret recordings in an effort to discredit mainstream media o ...

to try to discredit the ''Washington Post'' reporting. Crites uncovered a

GoFundMe GoFundMe is an American for-profit crowdfunding platform that allows people to raise money for events ranging from life events such as celebrations and graduations to challenging circumstances like accidents and illnesses. From 2010 to the be ...

page that linked Project Veritas to a woman who had been telling the ''Post'' that Roy Moore had impregnated her as a legally-underage teenager, and urging them to report on it. She also directly refuted Moore's claim's that an Alabama county didn't sell alcohol—when he'd been accused of procuring alcohol for a minor in that county—by finding evidence that the county allowed liquor sales seven years before the event occurred. Her research allowed the ''Post'' to outline a clear well-established case against Moore.

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Crites, Alice American librarians The Washington Post journalists Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting winners Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American women librarians 20th-century American women journalists 20th-century American journalists 20th-century American women writers 21st-century American journalists 21st-century American women journalists 21st-century American women writers Journalists from Maryland University System of Maryland alumni Carnegie Mellon University alumni