Alice Crites

Alice R. Crites is a Washington Post librarian and the researcher on the three-member team that won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. She specializes in politics and government.

Crites has been a researcher on six different Pulitzer-winning teams at Washington Post, 2006, 2008, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. She is an advocate for the role of researchers and news libraries in the support of journalism, saying "We're cost effective. We're expert searchers.... We not only get information, but also help avoid making mistakes."

Early life and education Crites is the daughter of an NIH cancer researcher and a librarian for the Montgomery County Schools. She worked for the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress before getting her MLS from the University of Maryland.

Career Crites started as a weekend worker at the Washington Post in 1990 and was hired full-time in 1992. at the Washington post. She specializes in research and reporting on government and politics; she has covered elections since 1994. In more recent years, she's used computer-assisted reporting as well as many specialty databases to pursue her work, noting in 2007 that some material—U.S. senators' legal defense fund documents, for example—could still only be accessed in person. In 2018 she was part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting on the false accusations made against Alabama senate candidate Roy Moore and the sting operation attached to the claims.

Part of Crites' work investigating Senate candidate Roy Moore involved combating misinformation that was being disseminated by Project Veritas to try to discredit the Washington Post reporting. She also directly refuted Moore's claim's that an Alabama county didn't sell alcohol—when he'd been accused of procuring alcohol for a minor in that county—by finding evidence that the county allowed liquor sales seven years before the event occurred.

Crites contributed in an article published by The Washington Post in 2020, going into detail on sexual assault allegations a woman in California claimed against Joe Biden.

Crites has contributed for several Pulitzer prize winning investigations including a 2017 investigation of Donald Trump's charitable giving.

She also contributed to reporting on the Elliot Rodger's shooting in California in 2014, discussing the gun regulation and ownership laws in California at the time.

She was among a group of reporters and researchers who left the Washington Post in late December 2023, when buy-outs were offered as a cost-cutting measure.