AT 2:59 P.M., I CHEWED MY NAILS AND LOOKED DOWN AT THE FLOOR. BARBARA STOOD LIKE A STATUE, ARMS FOLDED, HER LIPS DRAWN TIGHT. MICHAEL seemed anxious, too. He pressed his right palm to his cheek. Michelle Bjork sat at the computer, the Pulitzer website already on the screen. She repeatedly tapped the refresh button, but the site had yet to be updated with the 2010 winners.
Then at 3:04 p.m., we heard shouts from across the room. “Yes! Yes! Yes!” It was Kevin Bevan, the burly lumberjack-like news editor who’d coined the phrase “Tainted Justice.”
“Yes? Yes?” Michelle called out.
There it was on the computer screen. “2010 Pulitzer Prize winners: Investigative Reporting. Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman of the Philadelphia Daily News.”
The newsroom went bonkers. Gasps exploded into joyful shrieks and raucous cheers. Barbara and I sprang into the air like spastic crickets. Barbara’s long, honey-colored hair flew upward into a tangled flame, and we bear-hugged Michael, who lifted us off the ground and spun us around. Much of the staff was crying.
Barbara called Josh and Anna, her voice high-pitched in a Minnie Mouse squeak. “I won. We won the Pulitzer.”
“I knew it, Mom. I knew you’d do it. I’m so proud of you,” Josh said.
I called Karl at home. “We won!”
“You won!”
“Yeah, we won! Get your ass down here!”
Bottles of champagne materialized, followed by the sound of popping corks. Someone handed me an opened bottle of champagne. I looked around for cups and didn’t see any, so in a moment of lunacy, I took off my smelly sneaker and poured bubbly into the insole. I gripped the sneaker by the heel, tilted it to my mouth and took a giant swig. It was my tribute to shoe-leather journalism—in a newsroom with no cups.
When Karl arrived, gripping Brody’s hand and holding Sawyer on his hip, everyone applauded, and Karl’s eyes welled up. They were clapping for him. He had survived a year as a single dad, a year of feeding the kids dinner, giving them baths, putting them to bed, and waiting up for me—often past midnight. I couldn’t have won a Pulitzer without his help, and everyone knew it.
Soon, Inquirer reporters and editors graciously came down to our newsroom to congratulate us. By then someone had found cups, and the champagne flowed.
The crowd pressed Barbara and me to say a few words, and the room fell quiet. In halting, half-finished sentences, we told everyone that this wasn’t just our Pulitzer, it was theirs, too. They had picked up the slack, reporting and writing two or three stories a day so Barbara and I could chase Tainted Justice. “How many papers with thirty people . . . win a Pulitzer,” Barbara said shyly, shrinking from the attention.
With that, Michael raised his glass. “It’s a great day at the Daily News.”
Brian Tierney was at a Newspaper Association of America convention in Orlando when he got the call from Michael. He stood alone in an empty ballroom after a meeting had just broken up. He hung up the phone and stepped into the hallway, where bigwigs from the nation’s most prestigious newspapers milled about. He wore a high-wattage grin.
“What’s up?” asked a Washington Post executive.
“The Daily News just won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism,” Tierney blurted.
They gathered around, patting him on the back, “Way to go, Bri. Way to go, Brian!”
Tierney later laughed at himself when he realized that most of the newspaper executives congratulating him didn’t mention that they, too, had snagged a Pulitzer, though in a different category.
But the Daily News was an underdog—the only paper in the country to win a Pulitzer while in bankruptcy. Tierney was on a roll.
“A while back, I was saying that I had this dream we would win at the Third Circuit, then win a Pulitzer, and then we had a good outcome on the auction. . . . Two out of three ain’t bad, so, so far, so good,” Tierney told New York Times media writer David Carr.
About two weeks after we won the Pulitzer, a tense, twenty-nine-hour auction of the newspapers played out at a midtown Manhattan law firm. Tierney and his investment team were holed up in one room, while the creditors were bunkered in another, each camp sleep-deprived, fueled by coffee and emotion, as the bidding war ratcheted up. Tierney’s group hit $129 million, and the creditors topped that bid by $10 million. It was soon clear that no matter how much Tierney’s group put in, the creditors were going to outbid them.
In the end, the creditors won control of the Inquirer, the Daily News, and Philly.com for $139 million—roughly one quarter of the $515 million sale price four years earlier. Tierney couldn’t believe he’d lost. He turned to his group, his brown eyes and round face bewildered. “That’s it? It’s over? We’re done?”
Tierney felt helpless, just like when he learned his parents had died. “When my mom and dad, both times, when I got a call that they had died, there’s that sense when you put the phone down, and you realize there’s not a darn thing I can do. There’s nobody I can call, there’s no, like, ‘Oh, let me run there and I can help you.’ There was nothing you could do, and this felt the same way.”
Tierney boarded a train home from New York City and slumped into a seat. He stared out the window, nursing a Scotch. The train rolled into Philadelphia’s Thirtieth Street Station, where Tierney was met by a throng of TV, radio, and print journalists—all looking for a quote to that rote reporter question, “How do you feel?”
“It’s been a heck of a fight. . . . We didn’t make it. I think I’ll go home tonight and sleep like a baby, which means I’ll wake up every hour crying,” Tierney said, stealing John McCain’s line when he lost the 2008 presidential election to Barack Obama.
On May 21, 2010, Tierney sat in his twelfth-floor office for the last time. Feeling spent, he removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He packed up his belongings and walked out of the ivory tower on Broad Street.
Three days later, on a drizzling Monday morning, Barbara and I, along with Karl, walked through the gates leading into Columbia University’s majestic campus. We climbed the steps to the Low Library, an imposing neoclassical edifice, where the Pulitzers are awarded every year. We walked through the doors, greeted by bronze busts of Zeus and Apollo. Tables draped with white linen and adorned with china plates and wineglasses sat underneath the 106-foot ceiling of the library’s rotunda, surrounded by solid green marble columns.
We sat at a table with Michael Days, Gar Joseph, Michelle Bjork—and Brian Tierney. After accepting the award at the podium, we came back to the table, and Tierney stood up. He hugged us and wiped tears from his eyes.
“A beautiful and poetic ending,” he said.
The Pulitzer committee cited Barbara and me for “resourceful reporting.”
On the cab ride to the train station, I looked over at Barbara and smiled. “‘Resourceful.’ Resourceful—they got that right, Slime Sista,” referring to the nickname bestowed upon us by our cop detractors.
“You think resourceful is another word for crazy?” Barbara asked.
We laughed and playfully swatted each other on the arm.