In four years spent researching a book on the 91-year history of the public service Pulitzer Prizes and the journalists who won them, I encountered the quaintest tales in the cases of journalists caught off guard by the announcement of the honor.
By most accounts, an active rumor mill didn’t exist until an informal group of journalists calling itself “The Cabal” launched a campaign to “out” finalists about 10 years ago. The group focused on calling jurors and trading information about who was on their panels’ short lists, and distributing updated charts of finalists by e-mail. Editor & Publisher‘s Web site in recent years has assumed the primary role of scoping out Pulitzer candidates before they’re announced.
Thus, it’s not likely to happen these days that an unsuspecting reporter would get the Pulitzer-winning news by cablegram while on an Egyptian vacation with her husband, as Lois Wille did in 1963.
Wille had drafted the Pulitzer nomination letter for her paper, the old Chicago Daily News, for her articles calling early attention to the issue of birth control services being offered by public health programs. “Don’t be silly,” she had laughed when someone asked her if she expected to win. “This is just something I have to do. It’s routine.” And she believed it.
So when she was told that a cable had arrived, after a day of touring through Egypt, “I thought someone had died,” she recalls. “Why else would we be getting cables?” It turned out, of course, that it was announcing the prize she had won for the Daily News.
To the moral point that Pulitzer secrecy allows jurors to be honestwith themselves and the community, then, add this sentimental argument:The element of surprise makes for a much better “winners story” atPulitzer time.
Or consider the reaction of the husband-and-wife owners of the weekly Point Reyes Light, Dave and Cathy Mitchell, in 1979. They had reported from their remote area of west Marin County, north of San Francisco, about how the Synanon drug rehabilitation program had become a dangerous cult. The story had gone national after a Los Angeles attorney who had opposed Synanon was attacked by Synanon members who stuffed a rattlesnake in his mailbox. But with only 2,600 readers, Dave Mitchell thought little about the prospect of the Light taking the public-service Pulitzer.
Early on Pulitzer Monday, a Washington-based reporter called the Light newsroom to say there was a rumor that the paper might be named a prize winner that day.
Suddenly, Dave Mitchell wrote later, it occurred to him that if “the miracle should happen, I don’t want to be photographed looking like I just came off a ski slope.” He told himself: “You’re a country editor — dress like one.” He said he “took off the turtleneck and tucked a favorite red-plaid shirt into my blue jeans.”
To the moral point that Pulitzer secrecy allows jurors to be honest with themselves and the community, then, add this sentimental argument: The element of surprise makes for a much better “winners story” at Pulitzer time.
