The classic movie-industry question — How much added value does a film get from an Oscar? — rarely gets asked about newspapers and Pulitzer Prizes. There, the answer is clearer: not much, if anything.
Thus, Philadelphia Media Holdings L.L.C., owner of the vaunted Inquirer and the smaller, tabloid Philadelphia Daily News, probably won’t see a blip in the price to be paid at its bankruptcy-court auction on Tuesday. Not a dime to signify that Daily News investigative reporters Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman on April 12 won the first Pulitzer for a staffer at that paper since Signe Wilkinson’s cartooning prize in 1992 — and its first ever for a news-reporting effort.
But ask anyone at the Daily News what it was worth to win that Pulitzer for unearthing a police scandal — a story that its big sister, the Inquirer, had to follow all year — and that word from the MasterCard TV ad comes to mind: priceless.
“Honestly, I was completely shocked that we won, because it wasn’t new territory,” Ruderman said of the pair’s year-long series “Tainted Justice,” exposing improper tactics used by the police narcotics squad, calling hundreds of criminal cases into question. “It’s no big shocker, after all. Tell me something I don’t know. Every 10 years there’s a police scandal in Philadelphia.”
In a telephone interview, Ruderman especially reveled in how Inquirer editor Bill Marimow made the trip down from his own second-floor newsroom to join the first-floor celebration at what she calls “our scrappy little paper.”
In his own reporting days at the Inquirer, after all, Marimow was the master of the cop-shop: serving on a two-man team that won the Inquirer the 1978 public-service Pulitzer for exposing police-department abuses and winning the 1985 investigative Pulitzer of his own for reporting on how police dogs were misused in attacking suspects. (The Pulitzer investigative jury chair this year, Sacramento Bee editor Melanie Sill, said in an e-mail that the Daily News entry was “admired for the tenacity of the reporting” and “wasn’t viewed as a Daily News vs. Inquirer choice. It was an original story and its strength did not rest on any legacy of behavior.”)
Ruderman makes it clear that she’s a big Marimow fan. Ruderman worked for him during part of her five-year stint at the Inquirer, before she lost that job in a 2007 newsroom cutback. And it was Marimow, she said, who “negotiated my being parachuted down to the Daily News.”
The Inquirer-Daily News relationship, though, was considerably icier after the 52-year-old Barbara Laker and 40-year-old partner Ruderman began breaking stories on the police beat — an area that Marimow and his successors at the Inquirer had considered their purview.
“After we broke our first story, they broke out the computer-assisted reporting,” Ruderman said, noting that the bigger-budget Inquirer, with 18 Pulitzers on its wall, “got very interested in this story, and wanted to take the story away from us.” While the Inquirer began using “a lot of databases” in pursuit of follow-ups, she and Laker kept cultivating sources that the Inquirer didn’t have.
At one point, Ruderman said, someone in her newsroom intercepted an e-mail from an Inquirer editor — not Marimow — who wrote that it was up to the Inquirer to “mercilessly pound them” and upstage the dramatic Daily News coverage. Ruderman thinks of Marimow and the other Inquirer editors as “very classy people.” So she and Laker loved the somewhat crude competitive language. “That really ramped up how hard Barbara and I worked,” she added. “Those two words — mercilessly pound — were really in our minds.”
From experience, she also appreciates Marimow’s competitive nature. “This was Bill Marimow’s career,” she said. “So he brought in all these reporters to compete with me and Barbara.” And, she suspects, he “would be mortified to know that that memo made it around to us.”
For his part, Marimow demonstrates distinct class in his comments on the Pulitzer win for the Inquirer’s smaller sister. “We definitely wanted to compete on the story of police corruption, and although we produced some good, solid stories, we didn’t catch up to their formidable investigative work,” the editor wrote in an e-mail. “Wendy and Barbara did classical, stellar enterprise reporting that distinguished the pages of the Daily News — and would have distinguished the pages of The Inquirer.”
Specifically, they “listened carefully to the allegations of a police informant who told them about a police unit that was fabricating evidence and, then, robbing bodegas. They then pieced together a compelling and convincing series of reports through interviews with store owners, court documents and police search warrants. In my opinion, it was public service journalism at its best.”
He added, “I’m going to refrain from commenting on the intercepted memo.”
Recently, Marimow said, there has been “greater collegiality between the two newsrooms given the fact that we’re working on several projects together — such as special sections on health-related issues and business subjects.”
The joint celebration on the first floor was an indicator of that collegiality, as Inquirer staffers “actually trooped down to the Daily News newsroom to sip champagne in honor of Wendy and Barbara.” Indeed, a Daily News video of the event shows a smiling Marimow among the celebrants. “That kind of gesture,” he said, “would not have happened in 1985 when both The Inquirer and Daily News received Pulitzer Prizes.”
One who knows that well is Richard Aregood, who won the first Daily News Pulitzer, for editorial writing, those 25 years ago.
In a telephone interview from his office at the University of North Dakota, where he’s now a journalism professor, Aregood pointed to the sharp differences in the nature of the two papers over the years — with the Inquirer known for its more cerebral work, often winning honors for reporting on significant national problems. Ace Inquirer investigators James Steele and Donald Barlett typified the approach, which was encouraged by legendary Inquirer executive editor Gene Roberts.
Aregood recalled the jocular view at Knight Ridder, the company that then owned both the Daily News and the Inquirer: “The Inquirer is the U-2” — surveying issues from high above, while “the Daily News is a crop duster.”
Still a voracious Daily News reader — and a juror who also gave the Laker-Ruderman work high marks in the Scripps Howard Awards, one of which it also won — Aregood said that this year’s Pulitzer victory for the Daily News was especially sweet because the tabloid “was always beating the crap out of the Inquirer on these kinds of local stories.” Thus, when Marimow was involved in breaking two huge police-reporting scandals to win Pulitzers for the Inquirer, it struck a nerve.
Now, a quarter-century later — with both staffs hanging on events in the bankruptcy court ruling — the Daily News is striking back.
In Marimow’s view, “competition has both benefits and drawbacks.” In his e-mail, he wrote: “The greatest benefit, of course, is that it inspires journalists to want to outdo their competitors — in terms of publishing or posting revelations first and in providing greater insights into the most important issues of the day. The drawback is that competitive concerns can sometimes supersede the need to guarantee that a story is accurate, thorough and fair. In the case of the Inquirer and Daily News, the competition has always been fierce but fair.”
Agreed, said Aregood, who has long been friends with old rival Marimow. “I love him to pieces.” But when it comes to seeing the Daily News win the Pulitzer for a great police story, “I’m sure, despite Bill’s obvious sweetness, he was annoyed by it.”
Roy Harris is the author of “Pulitzer’s Gold: Behind the Prize for Public Service Journalism,” now updated to include the 2008 and 2009 Pulitzer Prizes, and available in paperback. He is a former Wall Street Journal reporter and editor in The Economist Group organization.
