Fresh off a Pulitzer Prize win last week for Local Reporting, our colleagues at the all-digital, nonprofit Baltimore Banner excelled at demonstrating how to get community news done and delivered. Its exploratory investigative series on Baltimore’s opioid crisis revealed an overdose rate nearly double that of any large U.S. city. Disproportionately, most were Black men in their mid-50s to early 70s — a segment of the population that died quietly, unnoticed.

This work alone was enough to win journalism’s highest national honor. But the Banner made an even greater, timeless contribution.

It shared its datasets, providing a roadmap for similar reporting in six publications across the country. All in the hope that more lives could be saved.

Yes, the Banner had the right resources, partnering with The New York Times on a local investigations fellowship to develop the winning series. Yes, the Banner is well-staffed with 85 full-time journalists to pick up any slack. But it was that additional gesture of sending out datasets that created public goodwill.

Here lies one power of local journalism – sharing what we learn about our own societal problems so others may benefit.

Partnering with other news outlets is an upside in today’s media landscape. It’s quite a switch from the old days of legacy media, when outlets competed so fiercely that the sharing of intel could have been a fireable offense.

Fatal overdoses occurred on a third of Baltimore’s blocks. And the Banner, in existence only since June 2022, provided this scale. Its series by Alissa Zhu, Nick Thieme and Jessica Gallagher found that from 2018 to 2022, 6,000 Baltimore residents died. To create context and compare Baltimore’s fatal overdose rates, the team looked outside the city’s limits and combed through data in every U.S. county. Hence, the abundance of data.

(Separately, outside of analyses done by the Banner, in 2022, manufactured fentanyl contributed to 65.5% of all overdose deaths in Oregon.)

The team also interviewed numerous grieving mothers, first responders and anyone with a story about or friendship with or connection to a person who fatally overdosed.

Consider, too, that this news gathering happened under the nose of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, a graduate program of a university world renowned for research. In Baltimore, no less.

The mortality figures are “really shocking,” Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, a vice dean at the school and former Baltimore health commissioner, told the Banner, adding the deaths were “unprecedented in the city’s history.”

Dr. Laura Herrera Scott, Maryland’s health secretary from January 2023 through February 2025, said the numbers are “horrifying. We haven’t deployed the right resources in the right places.”

The fatalities were more than nearly all of the fatal overdoses in Appalachia during the prescription pill crisis and even New York during the crack epidemic, according to the investigation.

The series led to local reforms, including the closing of a troubled drug treatment center. And it precedes what’s to come — pinpointing converging factors that made a sad pattern. How and why and, at what point in time, men from the same generation were most vulnerable to opioids.

Now, thanks to the Banner, more cities are armed with critical data to investigate what their own communities dearly need.