Column: Pulitzer Prizes

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Pulitzer Prizes—the best of the press

By Ted Pease
©1999

I don’t know yet who has won the 1999 Pulitzer Prizes — only a handful of people do. When the winners are announced tomorrow, most Americans won’t notice or care.

But at newspapers from Ames, Iowa, to New York City, people whose normal workplace demeanor is professional detachment will start wandering into the newsroom tomorrow just before 3 p.m. Eastern time, idly trying, and failing, to affect nonchalance. Everyone knows newspaper people don’t care about anything, but they care about this — and they should. So should the rest of us.

Newspaper people cultivate a pretty impervious callousness about what others think about them. They have to. Too often that affected insouciance comes out as arrogance or cynicism, but that detachment is just a psychological and practical defense that goes with the territory in a business where most of your customers either hate what you do or ignore it completely. Let me give you a little secret: Get past the affect and you will find social workers and priests beneath the professional crust. By definition, journalists are do-gooders. Once a year, whether they want to or not, they let themselves admit how deeply they care about what they do.

So tomorrow is a big day in American journalism.

The announcement will come in New York from George Rupp, the president of Columbia University, in the Pulitzer World Room on the third floor of the venerable Journalism Building, where Joseph Pulitzer’s enduring shrine to the very best and the very brightest in press performance resides. When the winner are named, a very few newspaper newsrooms around the country will explode with champagne and an uncharacteristic partisan joy that for that moment will link some of the most legendary and least known journalists of our time. Other newsrooms will be gloomy, because they didn’t win. But overall, there will be a certain warm satisfaction, a reaffirmation that journalistic excellence still lives.

A Pulitzer is journalism’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize — a gold medal in the press Olympics, newspaperdom’s Congressional Medal of Honor. When he died in 1911, Joseph Pulitzer, the legendary publisher of the New York World and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, created both a school to train journalists at the university level, and a yardstick to measure and reward the journalistic excellence he thought a democratic society deserved. The first prizes were awarded in 1917.

This past March 1, some 80 eminent journalists and scholars gathered in the Pulitzer World Room at Columbia University to set in motion tomorrow’s announcement. The jurors’ task was to cull the hundreds of entries for the 1999 Pulitzer Prizes in journalism. By some clerical error, I was among them.

Over three long days, the juries reviewed nearly 2,000 nominees for 14 journalism prizes. In addition, Pulitzers are awarded in seven arts and letters categories: fiction, drama, history, biography or autobiography, poetry, nonfiction and music.

The 14 journalism award categories are: public service (which is the ultimate gold medal), local breaking news, investigative reporting, explanatory reporting, beat reporting, national affairs, international affairs, feature writing, distinguished commentary, distinguished criticism, editorial writing, editorial cartooning, spot news photography, and feature photography.

At the end of the three days of deliberation in March, each journalism jury sent forward three finalists plus three alternates. Last week, the 19 luminaries of the Pulitzer Board convened to make the final decisions, which will come out tomorrow.

It is an enormous honor for a college professor from an ag school in northern Utah to be part of the process. I won’t name my fellow jurors, but they included top editors and publishers from some of the best newspapers and news and wire services in the country. And they took their responsibilities very, very seriously.

There is no fee for jurors. They pay their own way, taking four days or more off from their own jobs to do this one. I can tell you because I saw it with my own eyes that these are high-powered people, far from their own newsrooms and offices and responsibilities, with their sleeves rolled up, coffee cups in a stack, reading, taking notes, evaluating and haggling for 10 hours a day for three days. When you get right down to it, judging the Pulitzers is not as glamorous as you might think. But it’s heady stuff.

My jury was charged with deciding the three best columnists of 1999. There were seven of us, expanded from the usual five because of the large volume of nominations in the distinguished commentary category: 196 entries, each consisting of a nomination form and letter, and 10 columns. Once I got started on the enormous stack in the middle of our table, I thought to myself that I had to be crazy — I’d just finished grading 60-something USU student papers, so what the heck was I doing there doing more grading? But — no offense to my students — the quality of these term papers was a bit higher than I’m used to.

The stack of nominees included the usual suspects for a Pulitzer Party — journalistic icons, names everyone would recognize from the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, LA Times, Chicago Tribune — along with names you’ve never heard of.

The goal, for me, was to find writing that explained a piece of the world to readers in new and insightful and powerful ways. I made myself a list of what I was looking for: 1) powerful, evocative, descriptive, factual, passionate writing that moved me; 2) content that was universal, issues cutting across many lives and outlooks and cultures and communities; 3) a strong individual voice that reflected life and actual human beings in an identifiable community; 4) clear objectives that were achieved by the column’s end; 5) effective arguments, with support; and 6) writing writing writing.

By Day 3, we had culled the heap in the middle of the table to 24 entries, each with at least four positive votes. Some of these were quickly cut on the second read — although excellent stuff, they couldn’t muster the level of support among the seven jurors of some other entries. I hope someday these people learn that they reached such an elite group, because their work was wonderful. They should know we thought so.

The final list of three came surprisingly easy. After three days of close reading — seven of us scutinizing 196 files and nomination letters and 1,960 individual columns, and engaging in energetic haggling and energizing give-and-take — it took us just two ballots to agree on the final best of the best.

For me, the experience left me fatigued but proud of the profession. There is a lot of great work being done out there, and seeing the diligence that the juries brought to the task of evaluating it, busy people volunteering their time and energy to decide on the best the press has to offer — it all reaffirmed my faith in the value of journalism and the quality of American newspapers.

This column appeared in the Logan (Utah) Herald-Journal 3/28/99