Awarding a Pulitzer public service prize to two unrelated newspapers is a rare event over the 89-year history of the awards that were created in the will of newspaper pioneer Joseph Pulitzer.
Previous Pulitzer Boards have done it only five times. The last was in 1990, when both The Philadelphia Inquirer and the tiny Washington (N.C.) Daily News won. That was the only case of two newspapers winning for journalism projects on unconnected themes.
The North Carolina paper was honored for its courageous disclosures about the local water supply’s carcinogen contamination — a situation that local authorities knew about, but did not reveal or correct. The Inquirer’s Pulitzer recognized reporter Gilbert Gaul’s revelations about deceptive practices in the operation of the nation’s blood industry.
Calling it “unusual but not unheard of” for the Board to reach outside the jury recommendations for a public service winner, Pulitzer Prize Administrator Sig Gissler said Monday that the Times-Picayune work was “inside the magnetic field of the jury’s choices.” He noted that the Board members see a greater panorama of stories from all categories, and thus sometimes go beyond the jurors’ picks.
Gissler said that the Times-Picayune was an unusual case of a newspaper winning in public service and in another category for related coverage, in this case breaking news reporting. The 2002 Pulitzer gold medal awarded to The New York Times for coverage related to the 9/11 attacks was accompanied by six other prizes, five of them closely tied to terrorism or the war against terrorism.
Another example of a public service prize being complemented by another related Pulitzer occurred in 1958, when the Arkansas Gazette won for public service for its coverage of Little Rock school desegregation, and editor Harry S. Ashmore won for his editorials on the subject.
Before 1990, the Pulitzer Board presented gold medals to a pair of newspapers in 1967, when the Milwaukee Journal and The Louisville Courier-Journal each won for environmental stories. Prior to that, dual public service Pulitzers were awarded in three years during a four-year period from 1950 to 1953.
The 1953 prizes honored two small North Carolina weeklies — The (Whiteville) News Reporter and the Tabor City Tribune — for their campaigns against a regional revival of the Ku Klux Klan. In 1951, The Miami Herald and the Brooklyn Eagle each did crime reporting that the Pulitzer Board found worthy of the public service prize.
In 1950 — the first time two papers received gold medals for one year’s work — the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The Chicago Daily News won for the stories of Roy J. Harris and George Thiem, respectively, exposing the presence of Illinois journalists on the state payroll. (The Post-Dispatch’s Harris was the father of the writer of this article.)
In 1959, The (Utica, N.Y.) Observer-Dispatch and Utica Daily Press each won for their campaigns against corruption in their community. The papers were operated separately by Gannett, but later merged.
The results announced Monday did include a double winner in national reporting for two unrelated stories. The New York Times’ James Risen and Eric Licthblau were cited for their reports on the Bush administration’s domestic spying; the staffs of the San Diego Union Tribune and Copley News Service won for their stories on bribes accepted by former Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham that led to his resignation and imprisonment.
Newspapers, and not individuals, receive the public service prize, which is the only Pulitzer that does not come with a cash award.
Still, newspapers value the Pulitzer gold medal — bearing a profile of Benjamin Franklin on one side and a scene of a Franklin-era printer operarting a printing press on the reverse — above all other journalism awards. Each gold-plated silver medal costs the Pulitzer organization $2,000.
The two most heralded gold medals ever probably are those won by The New York Times, in 1972, for its publication of The Pentagon Papers, and The Washington Post, in 1973, for its coverage of the Watergate break-in and resulting cover-up in the Nixon administration. In 2003, The Boston Globe won the gold medal for detailing the extent of problems in the Catholic Church regarding priests sexually abusing children, and the Church’s cover-up of that situation.
Last year’s winner was the Los Angeles Times, for its coverage of problems at the King/Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch are the only papers to have won five public service prizes since the first Pulitzers in 1917.
When The Toledo Blade and The Washington Post were named as finalists in public service today, it suggested that the Pulitzer Board had reached outside the three juror-picked finalists to name The Times-Picayune as a gold medal winner. The names of three papers–the Sun Herald, Blade and Post — were rumored to have been finalists in the popular Pulitzer guessing game that begins each March, just after the juries meet at Columbia University’s journalism school. This year, the rumor mill involving actual winners selected by the Board was much quieter than in the past.
While Editor & Publisher carried rumored finalists on its Website this year in all 14 journalism categories, for example, through the weekend it had not listed any rumored winners. The Pulitzer Board met last week.
It was in 2004 that the Pulitzer Board last picked a public service winner not selected by the jurors in that category. That year, the Board moved The New York Times entry on workplace safety to public service from investigative reporting, where reporters David Barstow and Lowell Bergman had been nominated. The three juror-selected papers all were named public-service finalists.
For The Times-Picayune, today’s award is its second gold medal. The first was won in 1997 for a comprehensive study on the world’s fish supplies, detailing environmental and economic problems that threatened fisheries around the globe, and especially in the Gulf of Mexico. Another Newhouse chain paper, The Oregonian, won the gold medal in 2001 for its examination of abuses within the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service.
The (Biloxi, Miss.) Sun Herald has never before won a Pulitzer Prize. It’s owner, Knight Ridder, now has won 15 gold medals, more than any other news organization. The last Knight Ridder paper to win was the Grand Forks (N.D.) Herald, in 1998, for its coverage of Red River flooding, fires and blizzards in April 1997.
The McClatchy chain, which plans to retain Knight Ridder’s Sun Herald after its acquisition of Knight Ridder, has won five gold medals, two for the Anchorage (Alaska) Daily News, two for The Sacramento (Calif.) Bee, and one for Raleigh, N.C.’s The News & Observer.
Roy J. Harris Jr., a senior editor at CFO magazine and a former Wall Street Journal reporter and editor, is writing a book titled “Pulitzer‘s Gold: America’s Greatest Journalism Prize and Its Public Service Legacy,” for the University of Missouri Press.
Lauren Wolfe contributed to this article.
