For more than a month before last Monday’s Pulitzer Prize announcements, Renee Byer wondered what was wrong with the Feature Photography category, where her Sacramento Bee portfolio was entered.
Portraying the battle fought by a mother and her cancer-stricken son, Byer’s pictures had won other awards and seemed to have a chance for the Pulitzer. But there was no word on what the category’s three finalists were. The weekend before the Pulitzers were to be made
public, Byer flew to Seattle for a friend’s 50th birthday party, figuring that if she were a Pulitzer finalist, she would have heard.
It was a logical assumption. As most Pulitzer-watchers know, nearly all the 42 entries on the short lists in the 14 Pulitzer categories are leaked almost immediately by jurors, despite the pledge of secrecy they must sign. The game of information trading — among reporters and editors curious about how their own publications stacked up — in some ways was no different this year. Hours after the 70 jurors left Manhattan’s Columbia University Journalism Building, the usual wildfire of rumors had gone national. Two days later, the Editor & Publisher magazine Web site listed 30 finalists, missing only Criticism, Editorial Writing, Feature Photography and Breaking News Photography. Soon, E&P reporter Joe Strupp scoped out Criticism as well.
What was “wrong” with the three remaining categories, it turns out, was that their 10 jurors apparently kept their word. They did not discuss their selections with outsiders, and certainly not with the persistent Joe Strupp.
Once the 19-member Pulitzer Board met on the April 13 weekend to work with the jury short lists and to select final winners, advance word quietly began trickling to editors at winning papers, who then prepared their staffs for celebrations. But it wasn’t until Sunday, April 15, that a Bee editor first alerted Byer that she was in the running. Not only a contender, she learned she had probably won. Byer rushed to book a flight back to the Sacramento newsroom for the noon (West Coast time) announcement.
Sunday, too, was the first time that Arthur Browne, Heidi Evans and Beverly Weintraub of the New York Daily News got reliable word that they were finalists in Editorial Writing for editorials addressing the plight of Ground Zero workers whose health problems largely were ignored by the community since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Indeed, the word was that they would win, as well.
The rest of the journalism world, however, remained in the dark about the finalists in those three categories. (The winner in Breaking News Photography, judged by the same panel that nominated Feature Photography finalists, was Oded Balilty of the Associated Press, for a picture of a Jewish woman defying Israeli soldiers removing illegal settlers from the West Bank.)
A Serious Footnote
In some ways, of course, the leaking of Pulitzer finalists and winners each year is a tiny footnote to a story that mainly is about great journalism: extraordinary work represented by the 14 winning entries and finalists. But a serious question remains about why so many respected members of their profession, chosen as Pulitzer jurors, can’t keep the simple secret they have vowed they would protect.
To Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, this is more than a friendly joust between journalists eager to dig up hard-to-get news on the one hand and journalists trying to prevent it on the other.
“I have received many messages from jurors lamenting leakage,” he said in an e-mail responding to questions for this article.
He observed that “jury leaks can erode trust in editors,” and added that “especially in an era when journalists are defending the sanctity of confidentiality, an editor’s word should be an editor’s bond.”
What makes the leakage so embarrassing is that the secrecy pledge is anything but a light one. “It is sometimes forgotten that jurors sign a pledge twice — once when they agree to be jurors and once after we send them the rules and rundown on procedures and they signify acceptance.”
Representatives of the Pulitzer panels who kept their secrets say they saw it as something of a sacred duty.
Stan Tiner, editor of Gulfport, Mississippi’s Sun Herald and jury chair in Editorial Writing this year, is proud that his five-person panel “didn’t crack.” Said Tiner: “We agreed among ourselves that we had signed a pledge and that we’d keep our word.” Of the secrecy statement he signed, Tiner added, “I took it as a condition of service. I don’t want to put myself down as a paragon, or our jury. This (keeping of our word) shouldn’t be considered exceptional.”
Tiner, whose own Sun Herald was rumored to be a 2006 Public Service finalist within hours of the jury meeting last year, won’t discuss who might have asked him about his 2007 jury work. In a telephone interview, the editor acknowledged that jurors do get pelted with questions from all sides and often seem to participate in the information sharing. “That’s pretty well known,” he said, observing that “overall, there is a real conflict in the discussion between the journalists’ desire to get news and print it, and the commitment to hold information in confidence.” Tiner, who served as a juror about 10 years ago, said he doesn’t remember as much pressure for leaks in the 1990s.
I’ve judged everything from best-in-show at the 4-H to the Pulitzer Prizes now. And there’s always a surprise element that gives it value. I think it makes sense to respect that as part of the whole ambiance of the prize.”
— Mark Bowden, Pulitzer juror
His 2007 jury panel didn’t bring up confidentiality at first, he said. For one thing, administrator Gissler gave all jurors “a collective charge” not to discuss their results before deliberations began. For Tiner’s panel, the first priority was building trust among the members. “We were five strangers in a room with several hundred entries and a task ahead of us,” he said. “We developed a spirit, and shared basically who we were and what we did in our careers.” When the question of honoring the secrecy pledges did arise, Tiner said: “I had confidence in our group.”
Others on the panel brought their own interest in keeping secrets. “I personally don’t believe in signing anything about keeping my word,” says Cedar Rapids Gazette editor Mark Bowden, a first-time Pulitzer juror who served with Tiner. “I’m an Iowan; my word is my word. The signing didn’t solidify my vow.” But in Bowden’s view, confidentiality made sense from the start. “I’ve judged everything from best-in-show at the 4-H to the Pulitzer Prizes now,” he said. “And there’s always a surprise element that gives it value. I think it makes sense to respect that as part of the whole ambiance of the prize.”
Cracking Criticism
Over in the E&P newsroom, the website had its own mission: get all 14 groups of finalists sufficiently confirmed for publication. Within days of the juries completing their work, reporter Strupp’s success seemed to approach that of 2006, when he eventually was able to list all the jurors’ category choices. (In the case of public service, the Pulitzer Board reached into the second tier of public-service jury selections to give the Times-Picayune of New Orleans a prize, in addition to the Sun Herald. In the closest thing to a surprise at Pulitzer time in recent years, both papers thus won for coverage during Hurricane Katrina.)
“The juries finished their work on Wednesday, and by Friday we had 10 of them,” Strupp said of this year’s work. He won’t discuss his sources except to say that they change each year — just as the jury lists change. The Web site left both photography categories, the editorial category, and the criticism category blank, euphemistically describing them as “categories yet to be fleshed out.” When the reporter eventually got the three criticism finalists, there was a clue why it may have been more confusing than the others.
The first reports Strupp heard were that all three finalists were from the Los Angeles Times. “I had two people tell me they heard that,” he said. But it wasn’t enough to publish, and the sources didn’t have the names of all the finalists. “You have a certain feel when you’re onto the right thing. I follow that instinct,” he explained. Eventually, Strupp was able to confirm and print that two Times critics were finalists. He named the third as Jonathan Gold of LA Weekly (who eventually won the prize.)
Editorial Writing was another category that was frustrating for E&P. Like other edit-writers whose work had been entered, Arthur Browne of the New York Daily News scoured E&P after the jury meetings, but found no hint of the finalists. Strupp did start to hear edit-writing rumors in April, he said, but continued to list the category as to-be-fleshed-out. Strupp called Browne “about 10 days before the announcement,” the Daily News editor said. “Basically, he asked me if I’d heard anything, and he said they’d gotten second-hand reports that we were finalists.” Said Browne: “That was the first inkling we had.”
Then on Sunday, April 15, “I did get a call from someone not on the (Pulitzer) board, who said, ‘I really do think you have it,’” Browne said. “I didn’t ask where they got the information, but we all started to believe maybe it’s true.”
A Muddy Picture
Strupp says little about his progress in the two photography categories, which may be because there is little to say.
Kenny Irby, The Poynter Institute’s visual journalism group leader, who chaired the five-person Pulitzer jury for both Feature Photography and Breaking News Photography, said that “several of the jurors had been approached in the hallway, myself included. We were asked about what we had seen, and what we were thinking.” It didn’t surprise him. “Journalists are inquisitive; it’s a natural characteristic. And we get paid to find out things,” Irby said. But he said his jury discussed how there is “a high ethical and sacred trust with our audiences. We all agreed to address that” — and to keep their finalist choices confidential. “We talked about what a disservice it is for jurors to leak information.”
Added Irby, “As editors, we need to stem the tide of eroding credibility that journalists have in this society.”
“We talked about what a disservice it is for jurors to leak information. As editors, we need to stem the tide of eroding credibility that journalists have in this society.”
— Kenny Irby, Pulitzer juror
The Bee‘s Renee Byer noted that she had heard from someone who had been in the jury room that her portfolio appeared to be one of four still on the jury’s table at one point. (Most juries work out of the same room in the Journalism Building. Typically, they relegate losing entries to the floor, putting only the remaining prospects on the table, until there are only three left.) Several people at the Bee, knowing that Irby was a juror, called him, “but he wasn’t returning calls,” Byer said.
Looking back, she recalled, “I kept thinking they would be leaked sooner or later, so I kept checking E&P. But they never were.” It was, she said, “weighing on me a bit, because I knew I was close, and probably in the top four. Still, it worked out well because I wound up with my friends,” instead of sitting at home worrying that weekend.
She now says she sees value in jurors keeping the Pulitzer Prizes confidential until the end. “If it was kept like that for everybody — a big secret — that would be great,” Byer said.
Heidi Evans, one of the a Daily News edit writers who was named a Pulitzer winner this year, called it “amazing” that the jurors kept a secret in an environment in which there is so much leakage. “That panel,” she said, “may be worth a story for their integrity.”
Roy Harris is the author of “Pulitzer’s Gold: Behind the Prize for Public Service Journalism,” due out this fall from University of Missouri Press. A senior editor for The Economist’s CFO magazine and a former Wall Street Journal reporter, he regularly contributes to Poynter Online at Pulitzer time.
