After she received a directive from her editor at The Dallas Morning News to head immediately to Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina, Barbara Davidson loaded up her car with 35 gallons of gas and drove 12 hours straight to the devastated region.

Sleeping in cars, churches and a newspaper building in Mississippi and later in New Orleans, Davidson said she didn’t shower for 10 days and was at one time transmitting around 100 pictures a day – images that would be printed in newspapers all over the nation and receive hundreds of hits online.

Davidson is one of five 2006 Pulitzer Prize winners who shared behind-the-scenes details about the stories they investigated, lived through and continue to care about during a Friday afternoon AEJMC session.

Davidson showed a selection of compelling pictures depicting New Orleans just days after Hurricane Katrina hit, causing both members of the audience and fellow panelists to tear up.

“My lasting impression of this disaster is how a whole American city just imploded,” said Davidson, who specializes in overseas conflicts and has covered stories in Northern Ireland, Nigeria, Iraq and the Middle East. “That’s not supposed to happen here,” she said.

Brian Thevenot, a staff writer of eight years for The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, received two Pulitzers along with the rest of the newspaper’s staff in the categories of Public Service and Breaking News Reporting for coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

“Often a writer’s impulse is to get their arms around the whole [story],” said Thevenot, gesturing with his arms. “But you have a greater impact telling the story of one or two people.”

With seven or eight fellow journalists, one computer, a few notebooks and a couple of jugs of water, Thevenot and his crew slogged into the flooded streets to report the story. Their dispatches painted immediate and compelling portraits of the individuals affected by Hurricane Katrina.

Thevenot calls this “the narrow but deep approach to journalism.”

This method also brought Susan Schmidt, a reporter for The Washington Post since 1983, success in her revealing coverage of political lobbyist Jack Abramoff, winning her a Pulitzer for Investigative Reporting.

After an initial tip from a prominent Republican politician in 2003, Schmidt and her colleagues turned up mountains of information about Abramoff’s questionable practices.

“We had so much [material] that we had to pick a couple of issues and go deep on those,” Schmidt said.

Although it took four or five months to build the first article, once it was in print, the story exploded and people who formerly thought Abramoff was invincible called to give Schmidt information.

“The impact was stunning,” Schmidt said.

Jerry Kammer, a reporter with the Copley News Service since 2002, received a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting together with the staff of The San Diego Union-Tribune for similar exposés of Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, Rep. Jerry Lewis and lobbyist Bill Lowery.

Copley News and The Tribune uncovered that Cunningham took more than $2.4 million in bribes to help defense contractors land lucrative government contracts.

After reporter Marcus Stern of The Tribune looked at Cunningham’s real estate purchases out of curiosity, Stern and Kammer started unraveling Cunningham’s paper trail.

“We started looking at all the paper we could,” Kammer said. “You sort of develop a reporter’s mania, needing to look at everything.”

Doug Bates, associate editor of The Oregonian, received a Pulitzer Prize with Rick Attig for what the Pulitzer Committee called “their persuasive, richly reported editorials” on the deplorable state of an Oregon mental hospital.

Bates and Attig started a 10-month campaign to draw the attention of the legislature to the decrepit state of the Oregon State Mental Hospital, the setting for the film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

Bates and Attig visited the hospital themselves. Bates said they saw five or six patients shoved into rooms made for one or two and inspected a former crematorium, where they found thousands of canisters of ashes of forgotten people who had died at the hospital.

“I couldn’t sleep the night after I visited that place,” Bates said. “It was a 19th Century fright house.”

Because of the journalists’ careful reporting and continuous attention to the hospital, the Oregon Legislature passed a resolution authorizing the construction of a new mental hospital and began cleaning up what Bates calls a “stain on the state of Oregon.”