Zachary Mider celebrated his award in the Bloomberg newsroom on Monday, April 20. (Provided Photo)
He was once a small-town boy, but now Zachary Mider is a big-time journalist. Last month, Mider, who grew up in Newark Valley, became the first Bloomberg News writer ever to win the Pulitzer Prize.
In an interview on April 27, he said, “It’s pretty surreal. It hasn’t really quite sunk in yet.”
Mider won the Pulitzer in Explanatory Reporting for a 10-piece series on tax inversions. The concept sounds exceptionally boring, but the 37-year-old writer spiced some of his work with video clips and song lyrics.
One of the pieces, “The Greatest Tax Story Ever Told,” features video of a bizarre operetta written about Subpart F of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. The occasion for the operetta, performed in May 1990 for a group of corporate lawyers, was a celebration of corporate tax avoidance. That particular method of tax avoidance, called an inversion, was the focus of Mider’s series.
Mider explained, “The focus is on this concept called inversion, which became a popular thing last year on Wall Street.” An inversion is when “a U.S. company can kind of declare itself to be a foreign company for tax purposes.”
Last year, inversion was a hot topic in finance due to an uptick in the number of companies announcing inversion plans. Part of that, Mider said, was a “herd effect” in the pharmaceutical industry. Once enough companies started doing it, others decided that they need to as well, in order to avoid being outcompeted. Also, in some companies, shareholders started more aggressively pushing for inversions. Both Pfizer and Walgreens announced inversion plans last year, although neither followed through.
Long before becoming a tax law guru, Mider spent his childhood growing up in Tioga County. Although he was born in Endicott, Mider’s family moved to Newark Valley when he was nine and the future journalist graduated from Newark Valley High School as the valedictorian in 1996.
After high school, he completed two years at Deep Springs College in Deep Springs, Calif., before transferring to Harvard. (According to his mother, between colleges, “He took a semester off and worked as a cowboy.”)
Upon graduation, he found work at the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn., and later at the Providence Journal in Rhode Island.
In 2006, he and his wife decided they wanted to move to the New York City area, so Mider applied for an opening at Bloomberg News. He’s been at Bloomberg since then, first covering mergers and acquisitions and Wall Street and later joining enterprise team. Mider now lives in New Jersey with his wife and three children.
The winning journalist’s proud parents, Bonnie and Dick, still live in Newark Valley. Regarding her son’s recent achievement, Bonnie Mider said, “It’s pretty amazing.” She added, “I will tell you that we’re very proud of him, of course, but the Pulitzer Prize is only part of why we’re so proud of him. He’s a wonderful young man and a devoted husband and he is the best daddy in the world to our three grandchildren.”
Bonnie Mider is a retired Newark Valley teacher and she said that she hopes that today’s young Newark Valleyites are inspired by her son’s success: “I think it’s important for kids to know that from Newark Valley … you can go great places and do great things.”
