Investigative reporter won 2 Pulitzer Prizes in Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Investigative reporter Andrew Jay Schneider, who spent seven years in Pittsburgh working for The Pittsburgh Press, helping to win back-to-back Pulitzer Prizes for the newspaper in 1986 and 1987, died of heart failure early Saturday morning in a hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he was being treated for pulmonary disease. He was 74.
His managing editor at the Press during that time, Madelyn Ross, said she recalled when Mr. Schneider won his first Pulitzer, shared with Mary Pat Flaherty, for their investigation of problems in the nation’s organ transplantation system.
When asked how the prize might change his life, Ms. Ross said he replied “Probably not my life at all, but at least I know how my obituary will begin.”
But, Ms. Ross added, “He was so much more than a prize winner. … More significantly than the prize, his work changed our lives significantly.”
She said, after the organ transplant stories, “It changed the [allocation] system so it wasn't the richest people getting the organs anymore; it was the sickest. All the subsequent years after that story, people benefited with their lives.”
In turn, the 1987 prize honored stories written with Matthew Brelis, which revealed problems with the Federal Aviation Administration’s medical screening of airline pilots.
Mr. Brelis said his colleague on the project was “relentless and indefatigable.”
“That changed the American airlines system,” Ms. Ross said, “securing the safety and health of pilots and crew. So every time we get on a plane, Andy and Matt’s work is behind us.”
Mr. Schneider’s son, Patrick, 48, of Charlotte, N.C., followed in his father’s footsteps as a photojournalist for the past 25 years, for the past 10 running his own corporate photojournalism company.
In a Facebook tribute, his son wrote: “My dad made me the photojournalist, father and man that I am today, he taught me to always push to be my best. ... I look back across all of my memories growing up as a boy and traveling across the country with my dad on campaign trail, building darkroom after darkroom as we moved. Waking up my dad in the early morning hours so that he could drive me to spot news to photograph it before I was old enough to drive. Remembering that my dad was my harshest reviewer of my photography as I grew up always pushing me to be better and to never settle.”
His co-workers and friends in Pittsburgh remember big dinner parties at the Schneider home, where he enjoyed cooking for a crowd.
As listed in his Linkedin account, Mr. Schneider’s career after leaving Pittsburgh in 1991 took him to Scripps Howard News Service, the Oregonian in Portland, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Baltimore Sun, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and AOL News. After a year with Food Safety News, Mr. Schneider was devoted to reporting for his websites TheFoodWatchdog.com and Coldtruth.com. For the past several years, he was revising his 2004 book, “An Air That Still Kills,” written with David McCumber, now editor of the Montana Standard in Butte. The book was updated last year, which continued to follow an epidemic of asbestos-related deaths related to asbestos contamination in a vermiculite mine in Libby, Mont.
Before coming to Pittsburgh he had worked as an editor, writer and photographer at the Associated Press and worked in research in technological hazards in graduate school and taught journalism for a year at Indiana University.
“Andy was a rare journalist even among other great journalists,” Ms. Ross said. He looked for the big story, she said, “For example, he was tipped to the story that an airline pilot was being treated in a Pittsburgh hospital for a drug overdose. That was a story in itself, but he never stopped. He said, ‘Why did that happen, what are the systemic ills that need to be revealed? What's wrong with the system that allowed this happen?’ ”
He was once assigned to do a medical story in Haiti, but when a coup broke out while he was there, he insisted on reporting on the crisis. “That was typical of him,” Ms. Ross said. “It wasn’t luck as a reporter, he just never shied away from it. He wanted to be in the middle of things.”
Ms. Flaherty, an editor at The Washington Post, recalled her Press colleague:
"I had the good fortune to work with Andy when I was a young reporter at The Pittsburgh Press and we traveled for weeks around the world. The man never had anything but a big, big plan when it came to a story he was chasing and if you were part of the hunt he raised your game, too.
“He elevated my ambitions and the ambitions of the newsroom. But he didn't just talk big. For many years in many cities, he delivered a body of work that held movers and shakers accountable to the moved and shaken. We should all be so lucky to leave that as our legacy."
Schneider is survived by his wife, Kathy Best; two children, Kelly Schneider of Seattle, and Patrick Schneider of Charlotte, N.C.; his former wife Carol Schneider of Charlotte; and two grandchildren.
A memorial service is planned but arrangements are not yet set.