America
Indian-descent software engineer shares Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting
Indian-descent
software engineer shares Pulitzer Prize
New York, April 22 A software engineer of Indian descent shared The
Wall Street Journal's Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in growing
recognition of the importance of using information technology tools for
reporting as well as for presentation.
Palani Kumanan, who is a software architect and technical lead with Dow Jones
that publishes the Journal, was a part of the winning project's graphics team,
according to Michael Siconolfi, the newspaper's investigations editor.
The Journal won the top journalism award announced Monday for its mammoth
investigative project, "Medicare Unmasked." The series mined data
obtained from the US government after a prolonged legal fight.
The Journal articles exposed fraud and waste in Medicare, the government health
insurance program covering about 43 million senior citizens and about 9 million
people with severe disablities. The exposures led to Congressional inquiries
and criminal prosecutions.
Kumanan, a graduate of the PSG College of Technology in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu,
developed the interactive database on Medicare billing used to analyse
government payments made to over 880,000 medical service providers, including
doctors and hospitals. From the this mountain of data, readers were also able
to use an interactive database created on the newspaper's website to find for
themselves information about various medical service providers and analyse it.
In the digital age, coding and software applications are becoming essential
journalism tools and training institutions have begun incorporating them into
journalism curriculum. Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, for
example, has been offering a dual-degree program in journalism and computer
science.
Journal's Geeta Anand, who is now based in India, shared a Pulitzer in 2003 for
reports on corporate scandals. The next year, a series on rationing in
healthcare that she worked on was a Pulitzer finalist.
Last year, Vijay Seshadri won the poetry Pulitzer Prize for his collection,
"3 Sections," and in 2011, Siddhatha Mukherjee, a doctor and medical
researcher, received the Pulitzer non-fiction book award for "The Emperor
of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer."