Stanley Nelson, a reporter for The Center for Investigative Reporting's Civil Rights Cold Case Project, has been honored as a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for work on a decades-old killing.

Nelson, an editor at The Concordia Sentinel in Ferriday-Vidalia, La., was selected by Pulitzer judges in the Local Reporting category due to "his courageous and determined efforts to unravel a long forgotten Ku Klux Klan murder during the Civil Rights era."

Earlier this year, Nelson was chosen as a winner of the University of Oregon's Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism and as the inaugural recipient of the LSU Manship School of Mass Communication’s Courage and Justice Award.