In the middle of Iowa is a tiny town of around 10,000 people called Storm Lake.
It's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it kind of place.
We are in north-west Iowa, the middle of nowhere, basically. A lot of corn and soy bean fields around us
and hog and turkey buildings. This is what we would call the protein centre of Iowa.
It's an oasis in the middle of a desert. I guess that's the best way of saying it. It's a diamond in the rough.
It takes me seven minutes to drive from the north-west side of town to the south-east side of town
Even though there are only 10,000 people in Storm Lake, each one of them has a story
and we're trying to tell all those stories. We don't have mountains and we don't have seas
And we don't have bright lights and fast cars. We used to have clean air and clean water
and honest and open government. And we're losing all that. And people don't care.
And so somebody has to care.
And somebody has to say, this ain't right. Somebody has to say something. So we did.
My name's Art Cullen, I'm the editor of the Storm Lake Times Newspaper in Storm Lake, Iowa.
My brother John started the paper so he's our fearless publisher and media tycoon
John's wife, Mary, does a recipe column for us and Delores, my wife, is a feature writer and photographer.
Also, my son Tom is a reporter here. He's 24 and he's in 2 years become one of the best reporters in Iowa.
In his father's humble and unbiased opinion
They're saying biased behind me.
We're a hyper-local community newspaper. We sell about 3000 copies twice a week.
We're not the New York Times or the Washington Post, we do not do reporting on Donald Trump
or North Korea or Afghanistan. We're not a high-brow newspaper, we're just a community newspaper.
We run puppies on the front page and babies and four-leaf clovers. That's the stuff we trade in.
Okay, here's a semi-accident.
That's what I'm talking about. That's a Fairway Truck. That's a good one.
This is all ice cream and then you've got your guy.
See that, ice cream.
Despite the onslaught of social media and things like that offer alternatives to the newspaper, the print edition
we think that the community newspaper still is the force that binds a small community together.
Google doesn't care about Storm Lake, Iowa. Yahoo doesn't care about Storm Lake, Iowa.
But the Storm Lake Times cares about Storm Lake, Iowa.
Because people have got to know whether or not their President's a crook. Well, I'm not a crook.
I've earned everything I've got.
I was in the first post-Watergate class in 1975. That year, the journalism program was the second largest major
right behind business. It shows you how interested people were in journalism at that time
and of course we all thought we could change the world. We could end the Vietnam War
we could bring down Richard Nixon and we could change the world for the better.
You know, that's really why I got into journalism.
In 2015, father and son, Art and Tom Cullen, started reporting on a story of water pollution in their local area
Iowa is far different now, it used to be a state of smaller family farms
and now it's a state of large family corporate farms that are farming 1000 to 2000 acres intensively with
corn and soy beans. And so agriculture is greatly specialised
and there are huge environmental consequences that flow from it.
The result has been improved drainage systems that deliver free flowing nutrients away from the landscape
towards the rivers and the lakes and it also delivers those deadly toxins with it - nitrate and phosphorus
which cause all sorts of problems in humans.
3 local counties near Storm Lake were being sued for polluting the Raccoon River, the main source of
drinking water for the state capital, Des Moines. The counties had deep pockets for their legal defence but they refused to say who was paying their legal bills and why.
they refused to say who was paying their legal bills and why.
Our questions were how they were paying for the attorneys that were representing them in that case.
They could've chosen their county attorney but they chose not to. They chose several law firms, locally, state-wide
and nation-wide. So then, we consulted with the Iowa Freedom of Information Council and we said
"Are these records public?" and they told us "Yes, they are." That escalated into a 2-year legal battle
to try and uncover the donors to this law suit.
We demanded to know who the donors were to this secret defence fund and they refused to tell us
over a two year period and so we wrote a series of editorials talking about this law suit, talking about how
it was being financed and how dirty money, dirty dark money was now seeping into our court system.
And Iowa has always maintained itself as the cleanest court system in America and we're losing all that now
just as we're losing our soil down the Mississippi River
It raised questions for us as to who was actually determining the future of our locally elected government
Was it the electors or was it the Iowa Farm Bureau and the Agribusiness Association of Iowa
and Coke fertiliser and Monsanto. Who is running this state? Is it us or is it somebody else?
And it appears it's somebody else.
Art and Tom's reporting hit the world's stage last month when their coverage won a Pulitzer Prize.
Nobody cared. They were all just ignoring us. And then we win a Pulitzer Prize and all of a sudden
'Oh! Iowa has a water quality problem.'
Prize goes to Art Cullen of the Storm Lake Times, Storm Lake, Iowa. Congratulations, Art Cullen
A lot of people in America right now are trying to figure out what's going on in the heartland.
People are sensing that there is something going on here and that we've lost quite a bit out here.
And I think that's maybe what the Pulitzer Committee was sensing.
I aspired to be my Dad when I was a little kid in English class. I remember my dad would read through my essays
and make them better and I always wanted to be that good. So I guess that's what ties it all together.
If you want to make friends or be beloved by everyone in a small town
you shouldn't be a banker or a newspaper editor. I think it was Mark Twain who said the role of a newspaper
is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. And that's what we try to do