Pulitzer winner Burton retiring from WSJ

Tom Burton, who has been a Wall Street Journal reporter writing about medicine and the FDA for 31 years, is retiring from the paper.

He is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 2004.

The prize, which came from work he produced with colleague Kevin Helliker, was for their groundbreaking examination of aneurysms, an often overlooked medical condition that kills thousands of Americans each year.

During his last year in law school, Burton was a Washington, DC-based reporter for the Dallas Times Herald before going to work at the paper’s main office in Dallas and also spent time in the paper’s Dallas bureau. In 1975, he became an investigative and associate counsel with the New York State Assembly’s Office of Legislative Oversight and Investigation, based in New York City.

Burton returned to journalism in 1976 as a reporter with the Baltimore Sun. From 1978 to 1990, he was an investigative reporter first for the Philadelphia Bulletin (1978-1981), and later for the Chicago Sun Times (1981-1985) and the Chicago Tribune (1985-1989).

He won a 1993 Peter Lisagor award in the business journalism category from the Chicago Headline Club for this coverage of Baxter International, and in 1995, he won a Peter Lisagor award for feature writing in the business/wire service category.

Along with two other Journal reporters, he won a 1996 Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism in the large newspaper category for their stories examining allegations of price-fixing and other illegalities at Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., the world’s leading grain processor.

The same team also won first place in the special projects category from the National Association of Agricultural Journalists in 1996 for their Archer-Daniels Midland coverage.