With all due respect to Susan Fowler and her courage, I think this would be an insult to investigative journalism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize#Categories
Only 1 out of 21 categories are reserved for investigative journalism, and there are categories reserved for commentary, criticism, and editorial, all of which are potentially suitable for Fowler's article.
None of those are really suitable nor would her blog piece be competitive in a category that would only be potentially suitable. And in my opinion it certainly doesn't deserve a pulitzer in investigative journalism.
I think it would be cool to a new category for something like this that better captures the intent of the piece.
There is a difference between writing about events in which you are a principal actor and ones where you are not, though needless to say that line is often very blurry.
Thanks for reading. Not sure if you had a chance to read the actual article that ran between the headline and the comments section, but just in case ... In paragraph 10 of the story, I observe:
"It would be hard for a single blog post, no matter how detailed, to compete in the Pulitzers' investigative reporting category, where winners tend to be multi-part series that involve resource-intensive data collection. But the Pulitzers' public-service category is more fluid."
More broadly, the grand old prizes (Nobel, Pulitzer, etc.) are wrestling with ways to update their century-old formats to match the world we live in. Any effort to stretch old boundaries will be at least slightly controversial. Even so, it's a more interesting world if the Nobel Prize for literature stretches to include Bob Dylan than if it doesn't. In the same way, starting to think about how/where to recognize the very best of the blogosphere in the Pulitzers is a conversation worth having.
I believe the whole point is that there was no data collection or investigation of any sort, just a bunch of (still) unconfirmed personal anecdotes.
Now, if she had somehow managed to legally obtain records of leaked emails and documents from different, corroborated sources, and managed to stitch together and paint a coherent narrative, then it wouldn't matter what training she received, she would be an investigative journalist and would and should be considered for the pulitzer, even though she wasn't writing for any traditional media source.
As it stands, she's put together a compelling piece of writing about personal experience that tends to be supported by other evidence that's only now coming forward, not collected by her and released by her.
Any sort of investigative journalism should pay attention to both investigation and jornalism (of any sort and format), or else it should not be considered for that category, or else there should be another category created for "personal experience shared".
Grade A snark like that is how we know this is a Pulitzer-winning journalist.
I can't think of a single redeeming value of snark to be honest. It's facetious, dishonest and toxic. It's not even good comedy.