It’s a good day for journalism. The Pulitzer Prizes were just announced (the Washington Post won, as did the Baltimore Sun, the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Anchorage Daily News and many others), and it’s also the birthday of Mollie Bly, a journalist who pretended to be mentally ill in order to spend 10 days undercover in the Blackwell’s Island Women’s Lunatic Asylum in New York and document the horrendous conditions she found there.

In 1889 Bly traveled around the world in 72 days, beating the fictional Phineas Fogg’s “Around the World in 80 Days” timetable and becoming famous in the process. She wrote both of these big stories for the New York World, owned by … Joseph Pulitzer.

At a time when the news is often decried and challenged, it’s good to remember all that it does for us, all that it continues to do.