The Write Stuff: Altoona native part of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism team
Grove honored for national reporting as lead author in series about Elon Musk
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More than 20 years ago, Blair County native Tom Grove applied to the Altoona Mirror for work as a reporter, but never received a response.
Now a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Grove this month shared a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting as lead author on one of seven 2024 stories that detailed the "political and personal shifts of the richest person in the world, Elon Musk," according to the Pulitzer committee.
Grove co-wrote "Elon Musk's Secret Conversations with Vladimir Putin," published Oct. 25, 2024.
"It's a little overwhelming," Grove said during a recent phone interview when questioned about winning the award.
"It's a good feeling to be recognized," though it feels a trifle "arbitrary," causing him to wonder whether he deserves it more than others in the news industry who are talented, hardworking and never receive that sort of recognition -- and sometimes even get laid off, he said.
It's really "the work that's important -- not the prize," he said. "If the prize comes, fantastic, but if you're doing the work according to the standards you hold for yourself, that is the gratification."
Nevertheless, Grove is now a recipient of what is generally recognized as the most prestigious American honor a journalist can receive.
Becoming a journalist
He became a journalist through the encouragement of a Russian language teacher at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va.
Her suggestion made sense, because he's a curious type who likes traveling and writing and learning languages, he said.
He majored in languages because they were easy for him, and he figured he could maintain high marks in those core subjects without much trouble, while taking "other fun and interesting courses," in fields like history, religion and sociology.
After college, he obtained a fellowship to study musical traditions in other countries -- he was into classical guitar.
"It was (mainly) a pretext to travel," he said.
While in Turkey, Georgia (the former Soviet republic) and Uzbekistan, he began to consider ideas for stories.
He then came home, applied unsuccessfully to the Mirror, waited tables at the U.S. Hotel, applied to the Columbia Journalism School and was accepted to a yearlong program there.
After that was over, he went to Istanbul, where he slept on couches for a year and made ends meet by freelancing for the Toronto Globe and Mail and for Wired.
Then a position at Reuters opened up and he was hired.
He worked for that organization in Istanbul from 2005-10, then, still with Reuters, he transferred to Moscow -- a step up to a place where he wanted to be.
Russia was fascinating, with its 11 time zones, its having "fallen apart in front of my very eyes at 11 years old," its effort "to pull itself together to create a new sense of itself," its belief that it must correct historic wrongs and its thinking of itself "in the mold of a 19th-century empire," he said.
It was a country from whose orbit former Soviet republics were trying to disengage, even as Russia increasingly felt it had the right to tell such other nations what to do, he said.
He was in Moscow from 2010-20, starting with the Journal in 2015.
During that time, "it was my dream job," he said.
He's no longer able to be in Russia, his name having been placed on a Russian Foreign Ministry list of banned individuals, he said.
He didn't immediately recall what led to that.
"I think something I wrote pissed someone off," he said.
He's now stationed in Warsaw, Poland.
Eight months of work
The story cited by the Pulitzer board took eight months to produce, and sustaining the effort on such long, investigative pieces can be difficult.
"Something drags on and drags on, you (can be) tempted to let it go," he said. "You want the work to be done, but you're not done."
That kind of work is typically cyclical, with periods of excitement, intense work and progress, then lulls, he said.
In between, there are smaller news articles and feature stories that demand his attention, he said.
They serve as a distraction from the long-form work, while maintaining his connection to ongoing news and to publishing productivity.
It's often critical to "build the excitement back up and keep pushing" to be able to finish the investigative stories, he said.
It requires a persistence and a willingness to postpone gratification that matches what he needed as a track and cross country runner in high school, he said.
As a story develops and the time and thought invested become significant, the prospect of it all collapsing can be "terrifying," he said.
Such a collapse can happen if circumstances change in a way that makes the story moot.
Stories can also lose their punch if other publications get there first, although he generally pursues investigative subjects "weird enough" or "off the beaten path" enough that others aren't pursuing them, he said.
Handling the reams of notes that he needs to gather to write major stories is a challenge.
He records all his interviews, then transcribes them.
He invariably finds things during those transcriptions that he didn't understand the first time around, or overlooked, perhaps because they were not explicit.
He worries about not retaining "the little gems," he said. "The little golden nuggets that people give us," he said. "You have to be careful with them."
'How did I get here?'
As a reporter, he is sometimes afflicted with imposter syndrome.
Sometimes, if he's speaking to a national president or the head of an intelligence agency -- people "more powerful than you'll ever be" -- he'll think to himself, "How did I get here?" he said.
It's important for journalists not to identify with such people, he said.
"You're here to question them," he said. "It's not like you've made it there yourself."
Journalism demands daily sacrifices, but he enjoys every step of the process, he said.
He likes sitting in his office digesting long reports, he likes putting strangers at ease so they'll talk freely to him, he likes coming to a deep understanding of various subjects and he likes the "creative aspect" of writing, he said.
"I love it all," he stated.
It "blew (his) mind" to realize he could make a living by asking questions and writing stories based on the answers he got.
He considers himself a slow thinker.
"But once you get it, you get it," he said.
Good journalists try to arrive at the truth by approaching both sides of issues and verifying what they can, he said.
They evaluate the trustworthiness of sources, and report accordingly.
If you "play it straight," and one side is lying, "then you've misinformed your readers," he said.
It's possible to come up short in such work, "but it's the act of trying that sets a good journalist apart," he said.
That all applies to discrete facts as well as larger issues, according to Grove.
Good journalists drop their biases and don't hide relevant information, he said.
Nowadays, journalists must additionally contend with "the idea of truth (having been) run through the mud," coupled with real problems in mass media, he said.
That has led much of the public to turn to even more problematic news sources, according to Grove.
He's pleased to work for a paper that is rigorous for fact checking and editing, he said.
Among the stories in which he takes pride is one he finished recently about the Russian military's buildup of bases on its border, which required three months of gathering and collating classified information, he said.
"It's the most thorough story I've done completely on my own," he said.
But he doesn't mind cooperating with other reporters.
"One of the things that the Journal does wonderfully is to encourage collaboration," he said. "It's an incredibly collegial place to work."
His co-workers, who are "some of the smartest people I've ever met," give you time "on a constant basis," he said.
Journalists tend to be competitive, he conceded, "but we really do a better job when we put our heads together."
Such cooperation is responsible for the Journal's 2025 Pulitzer, according to the Journal itself, as stated in a press release published May 5: "The success of this reporting is due in large part to the cross-collaborative effort across The Wall Street Journal newsroom -- including contributions from the business and tech teams, the investigations team, the D.C. bureau, foreign reporting teams, the visual department and data team."
'Sense of voice'
Grove feels he came into his own as a journalist at some point after joining the Journal.
He was "pumping stories out" for Reuters, but he found that at the Journal, he "could write with a stronger sense of voice" and in a more creative fashion, expressing what he knew in ways he felt good about, especially after breaking "some really important stories" after a year or two, he said.
He was the first to bring to light information about the Wagner Group mercenary outfit founded and controlled by the late Yevgeny Prigozhin, he said.
The feeling of journalistic growth has progressed, so that "I feel like I came into a different sense of my own a couple years ago," he said.
Grove's father John is a trifle conflicted about the Pulitzer.
"My feelings are somewhat of a mixture -- profound pride intertwined with a sense of ambivalence about what this level of achievement signifies moving forward," the elder Grove wrote in an email. "It naturally raises the question of what further heights there are to scale."
Thomas Grove is critical of some common societal behaviors.
People are "too busy feeling like victims to have the time and space" to think about and understand others, he said.
"We're too busy in our own heads," he stated. "People need to get over themselves."
They should respect people who disagree with them and treat others like they would like to be treated, he said.
Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 814-949-7038.
The Grove file
Name: Thomas Grove, 45
Family: Parents, John and Judy Grove of Altoona; sister, Miranda; wife, Alejandra; daughters: Mila, 12, and Chiara, 5.
Home: Born and raised in Altoona, lived in Dutch Hill until age 10, then in the neighborhood near Baker Elementary School. Now based in Warsaw, Poland.
Education: Attended Pleasant Valley Elementary School, Roosevelt Junior High School and Altoona Area High School; then Washington and Lee University in Virginia and Columbia Journalism School.
Career: Has worked for Reuters and now The Wall Street Journal. Co-author of one of seven 2024 stories published by the Journal detailing the "political and personal shifts of the richest person in the world, Elon Musk" that earned the Journal the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.