Arkansas native Ginny Monk is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. Monk is a local reporter for the Connecticut Mirror, whose award-winning reporting showed how state laws had come to favor tow companies at the expense of low-income residents. She began her career writing for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. We spoke to Ginny yesterday over Zoom. She says the genesis of this story came from two different instances happening almost simultaneously.
Ginny Monk: I had been reporting on a tenant union out of Hamden, Connecticut, which is a suburb of New Haven, and they had been telling me, our cars are getting towed for really minor infractions, and then we're not getting them back. The company is selling them. Which sounded really crazy to me. Around the same time, my colleague Dave Altimari got a tip saying, hey, you need to look into this towing issue and kind of offering a few more details about what documents we should ask for. So we came together and it was a really good partnership.
Matthew Moore: When you think about what made this reporting maybe different or special from previous work that you've done — at what point did you start to think, this is really important, and this is stuff that we're getting that I can't believe we're getting?
Monk: I think there were, again, a couple of things. One, I had read a lot. I've written about poverty for many years, kind of the through line of my career. I wrote about it a lot in Arkansas and had read a lot about the importance of transportation. But I think talking to people who had lost their cars, people who had saved up to buy these fairly inexpensive vehicles and then getting them towed from their own homes and sold — it would result in things like loss of housing, loss of jobs, missed medical appointments, really big consequences for things like parking crooked. So I think that that was one piece, really. The human impact was quickly apparent. The other thing was the DMV tried to charge us $47,000 for the records, which was sort of an indicator that they really don't want us to get these records, and we'd really like to get them. And we also were helped immensely by some really wonderful data reporters. This was a hugely complicated data reporting project. So there were two reporters, Haru Coryne and Sophie Chou, who are from ProPublica, and they were just really wonderful to work with.
Moore: You won the prize for local reporting. How do you think about local reporting, both in your experience in Arkansas as a reporter here and your time now in Connecticut?
Monk: I think the thing that's so special about local reporting is existing in the community you're writing about, and that was especially special for me in Arkansas, growing up an Arkansan, growing up reading the Democrat-Gazette and knowing so many of the people who were reading the articles and offering feedback. And I think that's true just generally of local reporting. You know, I'm living in Connecticut. My mother-in-law's boyfriend — his car got towed during this process. So I had a little firsthand experience. I think that that's kind of the difference with national and local reporting.
Moore: And when you think about local reporting on your beat specifically — we're thinking about children's issues, we're thinking about housing — how do you find ways to make your reporting both very local, but also to an audience who might not be able to grasp how important local reporting is?
Monk: I think that that was one of the challenges and interesting things about working on this towing project was that we were working with ProPublica, which is a national organization. So there was really a lot of conversation in the editing process about how do we make a national audience care about this? And part of it is, you know, outrage. People are upset about inequities and unfairness in the systems that exist in our government. And then I think the other thing is there's some degree of relatability. Like we're all humans, we've all had tough experiences. And I think when you can portray people as complex human beings, you can make them relatable to a national audience. A lot of people can relate to getting their car towed.
Moore: Have you seen from your reporting any sort of action on the political level, on the policy level?
Monk: Yeah, pretty quickly in 2025, after our first story published, lawmakers said, we're going to look into this. They proposed a bill. And then in May 2025, they did a massive overhaul of the state's towing statutes. And then again, they've come back this year to make a few more changes after a bit more time studying the issue. Actually, it got final passage in the House of Representatives on Monday — they voted maybe 15 minutes before the Pulitzers were announced.
Moore: That's got to feel a bit affirmative for you, right? To witness this experience, to be able to report on it and then to see a very direct correlation between the work that you did helping your community. I mean, that's the ultimate goal of local reporting, right?
Monk: Yeah, I think it's hugely gratifying to know that your reporting has helped people in some way, and it's fairly infrequent. I think the more common thing is that you write about something and everyone says, oh man, that's tough, and moves on. So this one was special.
Moore: You're an alumnus of the University of Arkansas Journalism School. How did your time here prepare you to be a local reporter?
Monk: I think, you know, obviously there's tons of skills that you learn in college that you apply to investigative reporting and local reporting. I think especially the University of Arkansas staff was very focused on the message that journalism is people-centered. And I think that ethos is what drives good reporting and what drove this project.
Ginny Monk is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with the Connecticut Mirror. You can find a link to her award-winning series "On the Hook" at our website, kuaf.com. We spoke over Zoom yesterday.
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