2024 Dao Prize for Excellence in Local Journalism
Smiley Pool won the 2024 Best Local Journalism Dao Prize with Ari Sen and Lauren Caruba for The Dallas Morning News for their series exposing the critical gaps in trauma care, revealing that many lives could be saved with better access to blood transfusions in the field. They received $10,000 for their reporting.
Smiley Pool has photographed his fair share of history. Some of those events will appear in the history books, but he’s always found the family scrapbook variety more rewarding. His favorite assignments are the police officers, cancer survivors, schoolchildren, AIDS patients, street preachers, and countless other people who welcome him into their lives and allow him to help tell their stories.
Along the way he’s garnered his fair share of awards — most notably for contributing the aerial photography in The Dallas Morning News’ coverage of Hurricane Katrina. The Texas Managing Editors awards have named him Star Photojournalist of the Year seven times. He’s also won numerous POYi, Best of Photojournalism, and National Press Photographers Association awards.
He’s covered thousands of high school, college, and pro football games; 10 Olympic games; at least a dozen hurricanes; and dozens of presidents, popes, kings, and queens. He even spent a year embedded with the crew of NASA’s final Space Shuttle mission.
He currently works as a staff photographer at The Dallas Morning News, and previously worked for the Houston Chronicle, the Colorado Springs Gazette, Austin American-Statesman, and St. Louis Suburban Journals (as a stringer in high school).
His book Through The White Door is a documentary photography project that spans over two decades following a remarkable group of people who faced the HIV/AIDS crisis head-on and saved a generation of children.
Find Smiley’s photography for the “Bleeding Out” series here:
WHY SO MANY AMERICANS BLEED TO DEATH AFTER A TRAUMATIC INJURY, Lauren Caruba, November 28, 2023
‘WE WANT PEOPLE TO LIVE’: HOW SAN ANTONIO IS TRYING TO PREVENT DEATHS FROM BLOOD LOSS, Lauren Caruba, November 29, 2023
A SOUTH TEXAS MAN WAS BLEEDING OUT FROM A MAJOR ARM INJURY. WOULD HELP GET THERE IN TIME? Lauren Caruba, November 29, 2023
TRAUMA DESERTS IN RURAL AMERICA: WHERE YOU LIVE CAN DETERMINE WHETHER YOU LIVE, Lauren Caruba and Ari Sen, November 30, 2023
DALLAS-FORT WORTH LAGS BEHIND OTHER TEXAS CITIES IN EARLY BLOOD TRANSFUSION CARE. BUT THAT’S CHANGING, Lauren Caruba, December 1, 2023
A NORTH TEXAS MAN NEARLY DIED AFTER A HORRIFIC, HEAD-ON CRASH. HERE’S WHAT SAVED HIM, Lauren Caruba, December 1, 2023
HOW WE REPORTED OUR INVESTIGATION INTO STARK DISPARITIES IN TRAUMA CARE WITHIN THE U.S. HEALTH CARE SYSTEM, Ari Sen and Lauren Caruba, November 30, 2023
MAP: FIND YOUR NEAREST TRAUMA CENTER, Ari Sen and Lauren Caruba, December 1, 2023