Listen carefully, and the Washington Post staff’s cheers over its four Pulitzer Prizes may just be heard as far away as the White House lawn.
The Post (video from Post newsroom) captured Pulitzers Monday in the following categories: investigative, explanatory, beat and criticism. The New York Times won three — in national, international and commentary. And both The Times Picayune and the Rocky Mountain News won two. The Times Picayune won for breaking news as well as its public service category, and the Rocky won for feature writing and feature photography.
The four prizes for the Post represented the most the newspaper has ever won in a single year.
In terms of multiple wins in a year by a single news organization, it may be a long time before anyone eclipses the New York Times’ 2002 record of seven—half the journalism prizes that the Pulitzer Board bestows.
The celebration that year was muted. Six of those seven prizes grew directly out of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the global war on terrorism that they provoked.
In addition to the 2002 gold medal, honoring the paper itself for its publication of the special section, “A Nation Challenged,” the Times staff won for explanatory reporting. Barry Bearak won for international reporting and Thomas Friedman won for commentary, while the photography staff won both for breaking news and feature coverage.
The sole New York Times prize that wasn’t purely related to 9/11 that year was Gretchen Morgenson’s beat reporting prize, for her coverage of Wall Street.
The second-largest Pulitzer haul in a single year was the five won by the Los Angeles Times in 2004. While the New York Times took the gold medal that year—for David Barstow and Lowell Bergman’s coverage of workplace safety issues—the L.A. Times staff won for breaking news reporting of southern California wildfires, and for national reporting on Wal-Mart’s growth tactics. L.A. Times individuals winning prizes that year were auto writer Dan Neil, for criticism; William R. Stall for editorial writing, and Carolyn Cole for feature photography.
“You want to be part of a team that’s winning. And this was like the Red Sox beating the Yankees…” Former L.A. Times editor John Carroll on the paper’s 2004 Pulitzer winnings.That performance was a crowning achievement for a West Coast paper so often in the New York Times’ shadow. “It’s not enough to be good at what you do,” says John Carroll, the L.A. paper’s editor then, now the Knight visiting lecturer at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “You want to be part of a team that’s winning. And this was like the Red Sox beating the Yankees. Winning those Pulitzers gave staffers the sense that they themselves were being validated, as well as the paper.” The joy was unrestrained.
But in his April 2002 remarks to the assembled staff in New York, then-executive editor Howell Raines had to mix solemnity with the celebration, something he did admirably.
“It was our duty to report on a shattering period in the life of our city, our nation and the global community,” said Raines. He noted that the Pulitzer Board had specifically cited “Portraits of Grief” in bestowing the gold medal, a series of victim profiles that “embodied for the nation the sense of loss that we all experienced on September 11, and so I know all of our thoughts are very much in that spirit.”
Still, he wanted the staff to take pride in what he called “a performance that will be remembered and taught, remembered and studied, as long as journalism is taught and practiced.”
And how better to do that than to recall the words of “Mississippi’s greatest moral philosopher,” Dizzy Dean. “It ain’t braggin’,” Raines quoted the St. Louis Cardinal pitcher, “if you really done it.”
