NSU alumni part of AP team to be nominated for 2025 Pulitzer; both are previous winners

May 7, 2025

NATCHITOCHES – Associated Press journalists Gary Fields and Jim Mustian were part of a team of reporters named finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in the category of Breaking News Reporting.  The announcements were made May 5.

The finalists were praised for “fast, comprehensive and authoritative coverage of the assassination attempt on then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, including vivid details from the scene followed by the first reporting on gaps in security measures by the Secret Service and local law enforcement,” according to the Pulitzer.org. The series of articles to which Fields and Mustian contributed is available at https://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/22688.

Fields and Mustian are both alumni of Northwestern State University’s Department of Journalism and both are previous Pulitzer Prize winners.

“It is an honor to be in the conversation for a Pulitzer Prize, especially with this group of people at the AP. They did amazing work. Making this more meaningful is one of my teammates is fellow NSU grad, Jim Mustian. It really doesn’t get better than that,” Fields said.

“I am blessed to work with such talented journalists at The Associated Press who are committed to telling important stories like these,” Mustian said.

Fields is a 1982 and 1984 graduate of Northwestern State. He was among the reporters at the Wall Street Journal who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 in Breaking News for the paper’s coverage of the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Over his career, he has covered athletics, investigative projects, the U.S. Justice Department, criminal justice, mental health, tribal issues and religion.

His awards range from being the National Association of Black Journalists Journalist of the Year to winning a Thurgood Marshall Award for the coverage of death penalty issues and a White House Correspondence Award for covering criminal justice. Fields is a member of the Long Purple Line, NSU’s alumni hall of distinction.

Mustian graduated from NSU in 2008 and is an investigative reporter for the Associated Press in New York. Before joining AP in 2018, he was as an investigative reporter for the New Orleans Advocate, where he was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for a series about an unusual Louisiana law that allowed nonunanimous juries to convict people of felonies. A native of St. John the Baptist Parish, Mustian has also written for newspapers in Texas and Georgia. He graduated from NSU in 2008 and is currently an adjunct professor teaching feature writing and beat reporting for NSU’s Department of New Media, Journalism and Communication Arts.

“When Jim got hired at AP, I was happy as a clam that we’d gotten him,” Fields said.  “I always hoped we’d work together. It just adds something that the two guys from the real Northwestern – in Natchitoches – get to be involved and contribute to articles that are so highly honored. Looking at our careers, I can say the journalism/media school at NSU gave us some tools to work with.”

Fields and Mustian were both honored as Distinguished Communications Professionals in 2023 by NSU’s Department of New Media, Journalism and Communication Arts. Information on the Department is available at https://www.nsula.edu/newmedia/.