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April 16, 2006
And the winners are . . .
Tomorrow is a big day in journalism. It is the day the Pulitzer Prizes are announced.
I am a member of the board that selects the winners. I have pored over the finalists in all 14 categories. That is a total of 42 entries with as many as 20 stories per entry.
I am glad to be finished with the reading but even gladder to have seen once again the undiminished quality and importance of American newspaper journalism.
The problems of U.S. newspapers – flat and declining circulation and advertising, squeamish investors, even great metros in peril – make the headlines. But these are not simply newspapers’ problems; they are also the public’s problems. That is because the work newspaper journalists do remains absolutely essential to the republic.
And, as reading the Pulitzer finalists each year reminds me, they are doing it amazingly well. Newspaper journalists go where bloggers and flap-jaws never do. They dig into public records, hold politicians and government agencies accountable and report and write stories that people in power would prefer to keep quiet. They risk their lives to uncover hard truths.
Until the winners are announced, I’ll have to put off a discussion here of the winners and finalists, but I will tell you a bit about the process by which the Pulitzer are chosen (for a fuller explanation, see the Pulitzer web site).
Between 2,000 and 3,000 entries are submitted each year for Pulitzer Prizes in letters, music and journalism. Juries of distinguished writers, historians, composers, critics and journalists review the entries and select three finalists in each of the 21 categories.
The board that decides the winners comprises 18 voting members and the chairperson of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, where the prizes are administered. Board members generally serve three three-year terms – nine years. I have just finished my seventh year.
The board that met last week to decide on the winners included several names that you might know. The chairman was Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard humanities and literary scholar; the New York Times columnist Tom Friedman; Pulitzer Prize-winning Stanford historian David M. Kennedy; Nicholas Lemann, the Columbia journalism dean who also writes for the New Yorker; and Donald Graham, chairman of the Washington Post.
The bulk of the board’s membership comprises working editors like me. I won’t name them all, but they include Ann Marie Lipinski of the Chicago Tribune, Amanda Bennett of the the Philadelpia Inquirer, Greg Moore of the Denver Post and Anders Gyllenhaal of the Star Tribune in the Twin Cities (Anders is the uncle of Jake and Maggie).
In December, board members receive the first of the finalists in the letters categories. Between then and early March, we must read 15 books and three play scripts (we also see the plays if they are in production) and listen to the music finalists. In early March, the finalists selected by the journalism juries arrive in large, stapled, xeroxed sheafs. Increasingly journalism entries also include components from the newspapers’ websites. We receive the photography and editorial cartooning finalists on CDs, but we also look them over during our meeting in traditional portfolio form, which shows us how the competing newspapers used them.
Then the board meets to decide the winners. We started last Wednesday night with dinner and, for most of us, a trip to one of the drama finalists. Then, during 12 hours over the next two days in the World Room at Columbia, we argued over and decided on the winners.
In part because the board meets in secret, it has for many years been subject to criticism about insider trading and other sins. All I can tell you about that is that last week – as in my previous six times at the April meeting – the board took each category seriously and individually. Following a long-standing policy, anyone affiliated with a nominated entry left the room during the discussion of its category. Allies in one category became adversaries in the next. In each category, the board’s purpose was to hear out everyone’s praise and criticism and arrive at the best choice. And we all won some and lost some.
If experience is any guide, we then went home brain-dead on Friday night, savoring the winners and swallowing the disappointments. And one more thing: marveling at the quality of American journalism.
Posted by Mike Pride at April 16, 2006 04:27 AM