Pulitzer’s Gold: A Century of Public Service Journalism, revised and updated edition

The decision to abbreviate certain Pulitzer-winning accounts for this appendix, rather than to include longer versions in the book’s main section was often difficult. A few cases here deserve entire books of their own. But because Pulitzer’s Gold attempts to showcase the development of a century of American journalism, it was necessary to limit parts I, II, and III to give a sense of flow. Here, summaries of other winners appear in chronological order under the Pulitzer board’s citation. The descriptive handiwork of such citations varies; sometimes quite florid, they also can be terse or say almost nothing at all.

The main sources for these descriptions are the entries themselves and supporting material in Columbia University’s Pulitzer Prize archives, along with comments from jurors. Links to each year’s prizes can be found at www.pulitzer.org, the website of the Pulitzer Prizes. Other sources are as noted, with special attention to Editor and Publisher magazine.

No Pulitzer Prize in public service was given in 1917, 1920, 1925, or 1930.¹

As a southern paper, the Memphis Commercial Appeal took special risks launching a campaign against the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1920s. Cartoonist James Alley produced several cartoons that ridiculed Klan members, including one from December 1922 that pictured a Klan member in full regalia reading a book titled Law Enforcement. For the first time there was real competition for the Public Service Prize. Jurors forwarded five nominees to the board.

Herbert Bayard Swope, the executive editor of the New York World, moved on from his pursuit of the Ku Klux Klan (the gold medal winner in 1922) to direct his paper in taking on another social travesty: the use of prison camps in Florida and other southern states to punish people for minor or even nonexistent law violations, a system known as peonage. A Swope credo was that one should “boil over whenever wrong is done the little fellow.”² As an illustration, his newspaper took up the case of Martin Tabert, a North Dakota boy who had left the farm to seek work in Florida, traveling by rail without a ticket. When he was arrested and could not pay the $25 fine, Tabert was thrust among prisoners leased out by a local sheriff to a lumber camp. There he was horsewhipped to death, although his family was told he had died of malaria and pneumonia. When North Dakota tried in vain to get the death investigated in Florida, Swope’s World took over his case, tracking down fellow inmates, including one from Brooklyn who had kept a diary. Reporter Samuel Duff McCoy worked the story for two months, finding that a Florida state senator owned a turpentine camp that benefited from convict labor.

1926—Columbus (Ga.) Enquirer Sun for the service which it rendered in its brave and energetic fight against the Ku Klux Klan; against the enactment of a law barring the teaching of evolution; against dishonest and incompetent public officials and for justice to the Negro and against lynching.

The Pulitzer board picked the Enquirer Sun from seventeen public service entries. The Columbus paper’s submission was mainly a series of opinion pieces written by editor Julian LaRose Harris. Opposition to the Ku Klux Klan was prominent among the articles, but other topics were covered too. One column opposed those who stood against teaching evolution. (The Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee had captivated the nation in the summer of 1925, pitting Clarence Darrow against William Jennings Bryan.)

The anti-corruption work of the Indianapolis Times had a Ku Klux Klan connection. The paper exposed illegal activities involving the governor and a former state treasurer and also ties the two had to a former Grand Dragon of the Klan and “political dictator of the state.” Both the governor and the former treasurer were indicted. The board vote overruled the Columbia faculty jury, which had recommended the Minneapolis Tribune for a campaign to improve farming methods.

1929—New York Evening World for its effective campaign to correct evils in the administration of justice, including the fight to curb “ambulance chasers,” support of the “fence” bill, and measures to simplify procedure, prevent perjury and eliminate politics from municipal courts; a campaign which has been instrumental in securing remedial action.

The lead series in the wide-ranging New York Evening World entry was written by reporter William O. Trapp and exposed ambulance-chasing lawyers while another urged legislation against the fencing of stolen property. Selection of the Evening World was bitterly protested by the Philadelphia Sunday Transcript, which claimed that “the whole enterprise upon which the award was made to the New York World was originated by the Sunday Transcript.” The Philadelphia paper “certainly will not compete in any contest so long as it is under the Columbia University and the City of New York,” the paper said. Two years later, though, the Transcript was back with another public service entry.

Solicitor General John A. Boykin of the Atlanta Judicial Circuit wrote to support the Atlanta Constitution: “For many months there had been veiled allusions and undercover rumors of wholesale graft in the city government of Atlanta, but not until the Constitution courageously called for a sweeping investigation was my office able to obtain evidence upon which I could lay the situation before the grand jury.” The paper’s own nomination letter was written by the Constitution director of news and Pulitzer board member Julian LaRose Harris, who had moved from Georgia’s Columbus Enquirer Sun. The board picked the Constitution over the jury’s first choice, the Louisville Times, which worked to save the Cumberland Falls in a state park.³

The Indianapolis News won for an eighteen-month effort to rein in city government spending under the pressures of the Great Depression. The state legislature passed laws denying jurisdictions the right to boost their expenses, and the paper said its effort would produce an estimated savings of $12 million in a state budget of $156 million.

1933—New York World-Telegram for its series of articles on veterans relief, on the real estate bond evil, the campaign urging voters in the late New York City municipal election to “write in” the name of Joseph V. McKee, and the articles exposing the lottery schemes of various fraternal organizations.

The Scripps-Howard-owned New York World-Telegram won for an entry that covered a range of issues, some of them Depression-related. The centerpiece was a campaign calling attention to federal mismanagement of World War I veterans’ bonuses. Disabled veterans were often treated unfavorably compared to some who had seen no battlefield duty. Legislation was proposed to change veterans’ compensation and boost dependent pay for families of killed soldiers. Jurors said: “When others were pussyfooting, the World-Telegram, in the open, assailed evil where it found it. We believe it has followed in the footsteps of the editor whose benefaction established the prize for public service.”

Selection of the Sacramento Bee, which was on the reporting jury’s list, was for associate editor Arthur B. Waugh’s investigation of the qualifications of two of President Franklin Roosevelt’s federal judge nominees in Nevada. Waugh showed that Judge Frank H. Norcross, named to the circuit court of appeals, and William Woodburn, named to replace Norcross on the federal district bench, were associates of crime boss George Wingfield, who had masterminded the closure of a chain of banks in Nevada and was implicated in looting several companies. The appointments were dropped, and Nevadans overthrew the Wingfield machine in the fall elections.

Publisher Verne Marshall used Iowa’s Cedar Rapids Gazette to report on bootleggers, illegal slot machine operators, crooked state authorities, and Democratic Party campaign fund contributors who were involved in payoffs to public officials. The Gazette’s stories started a six-month grand jury inquiry into gambling and liquor violations, much of it across the state in Sioux City. Marshall and the Gazette defended themselves against several libel suits during the reporting. In leading a campaign against Iowa graft, according to a May 9, 1936, account in Editor and Publisher, he “testified before grand juries, dug up evidence, interviewed possible witnesses, wrote news stories of sweeping charges of graft in the state and stinging page one articles.” Editor and Publisher noted that the Iowa Supreme Court quashed thirty-one indictments stemming from the reporting and suggested that “one of the major reasons for disqualification of the indictments was payment of $700 by the Gazette” to a special prosecutor in the case.⁴

The Miami Daily News successfully fought for a landmark recall of the city commissioners, who had tried to double their own salaries and botched a harbor development project. Meanwhile commissioners paid off attorneys, created funds to remunerate campaign workers, and solicited a $250,000 bribe from a utility company president—until the president took out a newspaper ad announcing: “I Won’t Pay a Bribe.” At one point the paper started a front-page series called “Speaking of Termites,” attacking the city commission majority for “boring from within.” The newspaper helped the recall campaign collect 20,000 signatures in a city with only 36,000 registered voters.

The Waterbury Republican & American had spent ten years investigating the mayor and city controller under publisher William J. Pape and editor E. Robert Stevenson. Exposing wrongdoing had taken that long because officials had severely limited access to city records. The city government had also fought back using devious means. At one point the paper reported finding a Dictaphone hidden in the fireplace of Pape’s office—to record his conversations—and documented that the city had underwritten the spying with monthly payments to an investigator. The paper found indications of voting list padding and illicit financial dealings. Eventually Mayor H. Frank Hayes and city controller Daniel J. Leary were sentenced to the maximum prison terms of ten to fifteen years.

Publisher Harry Chandler’s Los Angeles Times, long known for its anti-union stands, California boosterism, and a sensationalist streak, fought with the Los Angeles County Bar Association over the right of the press to comment on court proceedings. Acting on a bar association petition, a judge had issued contempt citations declaring that publishing the editorials had interfered with the dispensation of justice. The Times could have paid a small fine and simply stopped such commentary. But it chose to fight. The bar association was upheld by higher courts all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled for the Times. Justices said there must be “clear and present danger” to the administration of justice before contempt citations are issued and the press is restrained. It was, in a way, a strange time for a First Amendment victory. “For the time being, the issue was set aside because American newspapers as a whole had accepted a voluntary program of self-censorship during World War II out of concern for national security,” wrote Pulitzer Prize historian John Hohenberg.

1943—Omaha (Neb.) World-Herald for its initiative and originality in planning a state-wide campaign for the collection of scrap metal for the war effort. The Nebraska plan was adopted on a national scale by the daily newspapers, resulting in a united effort which succeeded in supplying our war industries with necessary scrap material.

The World Herald’s campaign to collect scrap metal for the war effort had a significant impact, producing 103 pounds of scrap metal per person in its circulation area over three weeks in the summer of 1942. It also sparked a national scrap drive involving newspaper publishers from coast to coast. That effort, called the Nebraska Plan, produced enough scrap to ensure full operation of U.S. steel mills for war production during the winter of 1942.

Closely following political graft in Michigan’s state capital during World War II, the Detroit Free Press turned its attention to Republican boss Frank D. McKay—suspected of using Lansing as a base for involvement in criminal activity. The criminal case against him had become bogged down because prosecution was left in the hands of a McKay associate. Veteran Free Press crime reporter Kenneth McCormick, just back from a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, wrote stories about the need for a special prosecutor, and the Free Press editorials took that position. When one was named, indictments followed. But before McKay was indicted, one witness against him, State Senator Warren G. Hooper, was assassinated in a small Michigan town. The murder is unsolved to this day. McCormick’s story on the killing, early in 1945, couldn’t be part of the Pulitzer entry, but the Hooper killing made the Pulitzer board aware of how great the danger facing McCormick and the Free Press had been.

The Scranton Times assistant city editor George H. Martin, who discovered irregularities while he was doing routine federal courts rounds, learned that a seventy-three-year-old federal judge, Albert W. Johnson, was taking bribes in the courthouse. Crime-fighting Tennessee congressman Estes Kefauver said the judge was “selling justice” and called his case “the most corrupt situation that could possibly exist in any federal court.” The judge resigned, was denied his pension, and was finally indicted for conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstructing justice.

The Baltimore Sun reporter Howard M. Norton wrote a series of eighteen articles on problems with Maryland’s unemployment compensation system. Assigned to study the system, he explored lax controls governing payouts and excessive costs of plan administration. Part of the reason for the high cost was that racketeers and cheats were taking advantage of loopholes. The Maryland General Assembly proposed changes in the law, and a number of people abusing the system were convicted or pleaded guilty to charges. Norton became the first individual to be named in the citation accompanying the Public Service Prize. After that, naming one or more reporters became an option for the Pulitzer board. Between 1947 and 2015 it named reporters fourteen times, although the approach is becoming more common. Individuals were named ten times between 1990 and 2015.

A civic project by the Lincoln-based Nebraska State Journal created an “All-Star Primary” as a new element in the presidential election campaign. The brainchild of editor Raymond A. McConnell Jr., the presidential preference primary filled a void in the presidential nominating system and prompted a review of a primary election approach that had been created during the Andrew Jackson administration. The new primary, managed by a bi-partisan committee, allowed names to be entered on the ballot without the permission of the individuals proposed by the committee.⁵

The Miami Herald and the Brooklyn Eagle had independently fought organized crime for years. The Herald’s stories concluded a seven-year campaign that resulted in the removal of both the Dade County and Broward County sheriffs and broke a national gambling syndicate in Miami Beach that used wire communications illegally. The Eagle reporter Ed Reid exposed Brooklyn rackets and their connections to police. The paper sparked an investigation by the district attorney that led to numerous indictments.

1955—Columbus (Ga.) Ledger and Sunday Ledger-Enquirer for their complete news coverage and fearless editorial attack on widespread corruption in neighboring Phenix City, Ala., which were effective in destroying a corrupt and racket-ridden city government. The newspaper exhibited an early awareness of the evils of lax law enforcement before the situation in Phenix City erupted into murder. It covered the whole unfolding story of the final prosecution of the wrong-doers with skill, perception, force and courage.

The Ledger and the Sunday Ledger-Enquirer investigated vice-ridden Phenix City, Alabama, across the Chattahoochee River. The work gained national attention when Alabama’s crusading attorney general nominee, Albert L. Patterson, was gunned down in a parking lot in June 1954. Reporters had also been attacked by thugs. The investigation was largely done by Carlton Johnson, who had been detached from duties as city editor to take over the Phenix City staff, along with assistant city editor Thomas J. Sellers Jr. and county court house reporter Ray Jenkins. Eighty-seven racketeers and corrupt politicians had been imprisoned, indicted, or become fugitives from justice by the time of the award submission.

The seven-thousand-circulation Watsonville Register-Pajaronian, south of San Francisco, became suspicious of the city’s new district attorney. During their investigation, a reporter and photographer assigned by editor Roy Pinkerton discovered the D.A. visiting a gambler in a midnight meeting. When noticed by a thug in the gambler’s employ, the two journalists were held at gunpoint, and the camera was destroyed. As disclosures poured out, community support developed. The California attorney general began an investigation, and the D.A. resigned just as he was about to be tried for malicious misconduct.⁶

1957—Chicago Daily News for determined and courageous public service in exposing a $2,500,000 fraud centering in the office of the State Auditor of Illinois, resulting in the indictment and conviction of the State Auditor and others. This led to the reorganization of State procedures to prevent a recurrence of the fraud.

The Chicago Daily News—and George Thiem, who had helped the paper win a gold medal in 1950—targeted state auditor Orville L. Hodge based on a tip from a reader who said the respected millionaire businessman was involved in illegal activities. Hodge had been mentioned as a possible Republican candidate for governor. But twenty-one reporters and other staffers, with Thiem in charge, dug into Hodge’s affairs and unearthed a $2.5 million fraud that eventually sent him and assistant Edward Epping to prison, along with the bank president who had facilitated their crimes. During the pressure-filled investigation, the paper said that two city editors had suffered heart attacks while directing coverage.⁷

1959—Utica (N.Y.) Observer-Dispatch and Utica Daily Press for their successful campaign against corruption, gambling and vice in their home city and the achievement of sweeping civic reforms in the face of political pressure and threats of violence. By their stalwart leadership of the forces of good government, these newspapers upheld the best tradition of a free press.

The Gannett-owned Utica Observer-Dispatch and the Utica Daily Press fought a campaign against corruption, gambling, and vice, upsetting powerful forces in the community. Many local leaders did not want the city’s image tarnished by association with crime. The common council tried to levy a 5 percent tax on newspaper advertising to send a message to the editors. But the papers—published separately at the time but later combined—did not give up and ran more than eighty editorials attacking law enforcement lapses and suggesting that taxpayers were being defrauded. They used the Gannett News Service resources, including Albany bureau chief Jack Germond. The Daily Press city editor Tony Vella and city hall reporter William Lohden also were involved in the coverage, a job that was made harder because city officials had declared a news blackout against the two papers. Sweeping reforms were approved, and a number of crime figures were indicted and jailed.⁸

1960—Los Angeles Times for its thorough, sustained and well-conceived attack on narcotics traffic and the enterprising reporting of Gene Sherman, which led to the opening of negotiations between the United States and Mexico to halt the flow of illegal drugs into southern California and other border states.

The Los Angeles Times editor Nick Williams and city editor Taylor Trumbo put reporter Gene Sherman on the track of Mexican narcotics smugglers after they noticed a pattern in several drug seizures. Sherman wrote an eight-part series on Mexican narcotics smuggling after a seven-month investigation that took him through Tijuana, Tecate, Nogales, and Juarez to Mexicali and El Paso. He estimated that 75 percent of southern California’s heroin and 99 percent of its marijuana had been imported from Mexico. State and federal inquiries sprang from the investigation, and the United States and Mexico began discussing measures for increasing enforcement to reduce drug trafficking.⁹

1961—Amarillo (Tex.) Globe-Times for exposing a breakdown in local law enforcement with resultant punitive action that swept lax officials from their posts and brought about the election of a reform slate. The newspaper thus exerted its civic leadership in the finest tradition of journalism.

A phone tip to the Amarillo Globe-Times editor Thomas H. Thompson led to a meeting in a bar during which he was told he could have “information that would blow the top off the court house” if the tipster could be protected. The source, private detective Armand James Chandonnet, revealed that he had worked for county judge Roy Joe Stevens and knew of bribe taking and other wrongdoing by the judge. The string of stories in the paper—some by John Masterman and Don Boyett, working under city editor Paul Timmons—led to various legal proceedings against Stevens. He was acquitted but was disbarred and left the state. State legislation was enacted to close loopholes that Judge Stevens had used to go free at trial.¹⁰

The News & Herald, with its six-person news operation, ran a three-year campaign against illegal gambling and moonshining operations supported by political corruption. The paper’s campaign—under executive editor and editorial writer Edwin B. Callaway and managing editor Bob Brown—relied on the reporting work of W. U. “Duke” Newcome. When the state did not take action on the paper’s reports, editors went to newly elected governor Farris Bryant. Together they hatched a plan for digging out the entrenched crime. State investigators and the News & Herald reporters worked together on a long-term basis, with the paper agreeing to withhold publication until results were in. Eventually a former sheriff and police chief, among others, were indicted.¹¹

The Hutchinson News took the side of voters who had been disenfranchised by politicians through faulty district apportionment in the state legislature. When the News, under editor John McCormally, began its campaign for reapportionment, Kansas did not use a strict population basis for determining votes. That left many people poorly represented and locked politicians in for reelection. The same was true in many other states. The Supreme Court’s landmark 1962 Baker vs. Carr ruling had mandated fair, population-based reapportionment in setting districts. By then, however, the Hutchinson News had already proposed how Kansas could achieve that end. The paper had brought suit in the state courts, with board chairman John P. Harris, publisher Peter MacDonald, and McCormally leading the drive. It also made the case on its editorial pages. The Kansas courts ruled in the newspaper’s favor in 1964 and changed the basis of the state senate apportionment.¹²

The Boston Globe, under editor Thomas Winship, successfully campaigned to prevent Judge Francis X. Morrissey’s confirmation as a federal district judge. Morrissey had been a political worker for Joseph P. Kennedy and had been sponsored first by President John Kennedy and then by his brother, Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democratic senator. The Globe’s reporting was the work of a team spearheaded by political editor Robert L. Healey. It examined Judge Morrissey’s legal qualifications, found them wanting, and eventually questioned his veracity. The Globe thought the appointment “another example of politically inspired actions which had attained for Massachusetts a reputation of operating without a civic conscience in public matters.” But then reporters turned up apparent discrepancies in his testimony to a congressional subcommittee. In one they showed that Morrissey had not attended Boston College Law School as he claimed. When the Globe’s reporting drew national attention, opposition in the Senate grew, and Morrissey eventually requested that President Lyndon Johnson withdraw his name.¹³

The Louisville Courier-Journal and the Milwaukee Journal won for unrelated environmental campaigns in their states. The Courier-Journal had launched a drive to preserve Kentucky’s natural beauty with a special 1964 section, “Kentucky’s Ravaged Land.” It followed up that work in 1965 and 1966. In 1966, the state assembly reacted and passed a tough strip-mining control law. The Milwaukee Journal’s Public Service Prize—its first since 1919, when it campaigned against World War I “Germanism” in Wisconsin—was aimed at water pollution. A three-part series in its Picture Journal section used color photographs to show the effects of polluted water. The Wisconsin legislature cited the series when it passed a $300 million water pollution control law.¹⁴

Reporter George Ringwald of the Press-Enterprise focused on cases of apparent judicial and legal abuse involving the large Palm Springs-area land-holdings of about a hundred members of the Agua Caliente tribe of Native Americans. The tribal members were represented by court-appointed guardians and conservators who were responsible to the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs. Ringwald learned that some judges were being paid as executors of estate wills for tribal members. Meanwhile fellow judges rubber-stamped the lucrative arrangements. Eventually the Interior Department and the state judicial qualifications commission were both investigated.¹⁵

1971—The Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal and Sentinel for coverage of environmental problems, as exemplified by a successful campaign to block strip mining operations that would have caused irreparable damage to the hill country of northwest North Carolina.

The Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel covered the plans for a strip-mining enterprise after a reader tipped the paper that a New York company, Gibbsite Corporation, was buying up mineral leases in North Carolina’s remote Surry County. Reporter Arlene Edwards found that thousands of acres of mineral leases had been optioned to the company. It planned to strip-mine for alumina, which is processed into aluminum. Public opposition grew and the paper added reporters Joe Goodman, Jesse Poindexter, Raleigh correspondent Joe Doster, and state editor Jack Trawick to the project. At mid-year Gibbsite said it was letting its options expire. Editor and publisher Wallace Carroll, formerly of the New York Times, was a Pulitzer board member the year the Journal and Sentinel won. One little-discussed element of gold medal winning is the staff exodus. Joe Goodman noted that “when the prizes started showing up in ’71, hell, your whole staff is out there looking for jobs. I sure as hell was. So come, say, ’72, everybody’s gone.” Some went to Gene Roberts’s Philadelphia Inquirer, which had an eye for Pulitzer winners. It also had John Carroll as an Inquirer editor. Carroll, later the Los Angeles Times editor, was Wallace Carroll’s son.¹⁶ (John Carroll noted that his father kept battling for the environment after retiring in 1974, leading editors in a successful campaign against Duke Power Company’s damming of the New River. When his parents died, John Carroll said, their ashes were spread on the river’s still-pristine waters.)

As many northern cities faced high-pressure decisions about how to implement court-ordered integration, the Boston Globe took an approach to news coverage that alienated everybody. It reported the story from all sides. Angry white parents were stoning buses that carried black children to segregated south Boston schools. Senator Edward Kennedy, trying to calm the situation, was pelted with tomatoes and eggs at a rally, where someone yelled, “You’re a disgrace to the Irish.” The Globe also tried to calm things—leading some blacks to see it as too accepting of racism—but it was unquestionably thorough. Editor Thomas Winship and executive editor Jack Driscoll deployed sixty reporters, and in direct charge of this dispassionate coverage was the assistant managing editor for local news, Robert H. Phelps, a former chief of the paper’s Spotlight Team. The fairer the Globe was, the nastier the repercussions. Groups of parents who favored all-white schools broke windows at the paper’s offices. Rifle shots were fired and bomb threats received. The Globe installed steel shutters. Pulitzer Prize administrator John Hohenberg wrote in a discussion of its winning work: “Do not look for elegant writing in the Globe’s reportage. What went into the paper, day after day and week after week, was the guts of the best kind of newspaper journalism in this land—an unemotional, impartial, immensely detailed and thoroughly honest and accurate report of what was going on in the schools, the streets, the entire community.”¹⁷

Three Gannett News Service journalists—Tallahassee bureau chief John M. Hanchette, state editor William F. Schmick, and GNS national staffer Carlton A. Sherwood—examined financial mismanagement within the Pauline Fathers, an order of the Roman Catholic Church. All three had Catholic backgrounds, and Sherwood had once been a news editor of the Catholic Star-Herald in Camden, New Jersey. The investigation involved more than 200,000 miles of travel to Italy, Poland, Hungary, England, and seventeen U.S. states. The result was an eighteen-day series showing that officials had squandered millions of dollars of loans and charitable donations at the order once known as the Order of St. Paul the First Hermit. As many as 2,500 elderly Catholics were victims, having invested in bonds sold by the Pauline Fathers ostensibly to build a devotional shrine in Kittanning, Pennsylvania. Angry responses came from the Paulines, but a papal investigation confirmed many of the claims in the series, and those who invested in the bonds were repaid in full. It was the first instance of a Public Service Prize going to a news service.¹⁸

1982—The Detroit News for a series by Sydney P. Freedberg and David Ashenfelter which exposed the U.S. Navy’s cover-up of circumstances surrounding the deaths of seamen aboard ship and which led to significant reforms in naval procedures.

The Detroit News assigned reporter Sydney P. Freedberg, a second-year staffer just a few years out of Radcliffe College, to do a piece on the death of sailor Paul Trerice. He was a Navy enlisted man who had died under mysterious circumstances. In reporting reminiscent of what the Lufkin News had done five years earlier—to win the 1977 gold medal—Freedberg and assistant news editor David Ashenfelter revealed another military cover-up. The Navy told the family that an accident had occurred while Trerice was being punished aboard the carrier USS Ranger in the Pacific. The two journalists set out to find the truth, and their reporting led to the discovery that the sailor had died of heat stroke and a heart attack brought on by the mental and physical torment inflicted while he was being punished for a minor rule infraction. It was not the accident that the Navy had described. Further, the reporters found that the military routinely deceived families to protect itself from embarrassment and possible liability. “The Navy’s initial lies were an effort to shield grieving families from the anguish that the gory details might cause,” says Freedberg. “It started out as a humane policy.” But the deception had gotten out of hand.¹⁹

The Jackson Clarion-Ledger explored why Mississippi’s public schools “didn’t make the grade,” and editorials proposed solutions that fit with what reform-minded governor William Winter was doing. Reporter Nancy Weaver’s project was first put on hold during an ownership change that made Gannett its owner. New executive editor Charles Overby took charge and assigned more than a half-dozen other staffers to work with Weaver on what turned out to be a six-month investigation. Overby managed both the news and editorial components. It had been twenty-nine years since the state legislature’s last major improvement in the education system, and not even compulsory education was required. Mississippi’s management of desegregation had also hurt school financing and led to white children withdrawing from public schools. Weaver worked with reporters Fred Anklam Jr. and Cliff Tryens, among others, to produce a twenty-four-day series titled “Mississippi schools, Hard lessons.” Lee Cearnal was the project editor, and editorials were written by editorial director Dave Hardin, who helped analyze reform options. Results included new taxes passed by the voters to support schools, a mandatory attendance law, and the first state-supported kindergartens.²⁰

Describing its twenty-seven-part series on the Latino experience in southern California, the Pulitzer board cited the series for “enhancing understanding among the non-Latino majority of a community often perceived as mysterious and even threatening.” Seventeen Latino reporters, editors, and photographers had been assigned to the project under editors George Ramos and Frank Sotomayor. They interviewed one thousand people and polled nearly fifteen hundred in a survey covering social, cultural, and political issues. By most accounts, the series got its start after a number of Latino reporters brought an idea to William F. Thomas, who had been promoted from Metro editor to editor in 1971. But Thomas noted that the genesis was an earlier Times series on the experience of African Americans in Los Angeles that led Latino reporters to propose their project.²¹

The Denver Post’s project stemmed from reporter Diana Griego’s skepticism about government statistics on missing children—statistics that helped create the widespread belief that thousands of American children were kidnapped and murdered each year by strangers. With reporter Louis Kilzer, she worked under deputy Metro editor Charles R. Buxton Jr. to produce a series called “The Truth About Missing Kids.” Later Kilzer and reporter Norman Udevitz found a Denver fundraising firm that solicited money on behalf of a missing children’s organization but turned little of the proceeds to charity. Eventually the agency was shut down by authorities. A polling firm hired by the Post suggested that public perceptions in Denver exaggerated the threat to children, which accompanying Post projects illustrated. “Our reporting exposed a myth and told the truth about one of America’s most emotionally charged issues,” the Post editor David Hall said after the prize was announced.²²

Thirteen years after the Anchorage Daily News won the 1976 gold medal for its study of the Teamsters Union in the state, the paper took on a daunting social issue: rampant alcoholism and suicide among native Alaskans. Howard Weaver, a reporter on the Teamster series, had become managing editor. “We were older and smarter, and there was that Pulitzer Gold Medal on the wall,” he says. “That amplifies your voice, which is a wonderful consequence.” The paper used its new Macintosh computer to create a database of rural deaths, drawing from all the press releases put out by Alaska state troopers in recent years, and calculated how many were accidental or alcohol-related or suicides. It was data no one had ever compiled before, says Weaver. Among the challenges: alcohol and suicide were “subjects about which people are always in complete denial, whether it’s in Manhattan, New York, or Manhattan, Kansas, or in Alaska.” The paper was extremely sensitive to the native communities in its coverage, telling of dashed dreams and disappointments but also capturing the nobility of individuals and their culture. In a technique eerily predictive of the “Portraits of Grief” that the New York Times would design after the September 11, 2001, tragedy, the Anchorage paper prepared full pages of personal notices about the native Alaskans who had died in recent years but whose deaths had gotten no news coverage.

The Akron Beacon Journal launched a year-long study of racial attitudes under the heading “A Question of Color.” Through it the paper looked at how housing, education, economic opportunity, and crime were affected by race. Managing editor Glenn Guzzo said, “All these are intractable problems and what we found is that you can’t talk about solving these problems unless you also address the issue of race.” The paper produced twelve separate series, one per month for the entire year, examining different elements of race in the community. The 1992 Los Angeles riots prompted the series, Guzzo said, after “we recognized that the supposed progress in race relations we have made in the last decade maybe hadn’t come as far as we’d believed.” The Beacon Journal committed twenty-nine staffers to the project for the year. The community responded with 22,000 individuals and scores of organizations offering to help improve race relations.²³

1995—The Virgin Islands Daily News, St. Thomas, for its disclosure of the links between the region’s rampant crime rate and corruption in the local criminal justice system. The reporting, largely the work of Melvin Claxton, initiated political reforms.²⁴

Investigating widespread crime in the territory, the Virgin Islands Daily News reporter Melvin Claxton identified numerous issues: the ease of criminals getting guns, law enforcement corruption and incompetence, inept criminal prosecutions, light sentencing by judges, and inadequacies with probation. A six-month investigation drew on statistical analyses showing that of 25,000 violent crimes reported over four years ending in 1993, only 1,400 cases had gone to court, and fewer than 10 percent of reported crimes were even investigated. It resulted in a ten-day series exposing money misspent on the prison system. “The territory spends more than any state—$5,000 a year—to house and feed a juvenile inmate. That is more than 10 times the amount experts say it costs to run preventive programs that would keep them straight,” wrote Claxton, an Antigua native.²⁵

2001—The Oregonian, Portland, for its detailed and unflinching examination of systematic problems within the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, including harsh treatment of foreign nationals and other widespread abuses, which prompted various reforms.²⁶