The centennial of the Pulitzer Prizes in 2016 casts a new light on the journalism that is honored with their most coveted award: the gold medal for meritorious public service. Through all the changes that a century has wrought within news organizations—changes both technological and cultural—winners of this one annual Pulitzer Prize have continued to exemplify an eternal force in quality reporting: the drive to dig for the truth and present that truth persuasively to a publication’s audience.
With so much uncertain about the future of journalism today, the study of these “stories behind the stories” still has tremendous value. The back stories offer lessons in public service reporting at the highest level and show how society benefits from that reporting. They show how journalists are adjusting their approach to fit new times and new technologies. Plus, as pure newsroom adventures, they make exciting and rewarding reading.
This new edition of Pulitzer’s Gold adopts a celebratory tone, as befits 100th birthday recognition. Twenty-first-century winners get the most attention while the decades of interplay between the Pulitzers and history become an even stronger theme.
The 2014 Pulitzer Gold Medals certainly represented a case of the media and history intertwined. One prize was awarded to the Washington Post and another to the Guardian-U.S. website for the public service of analyzing government documents that detailed extreme and hidden levels of administration surveillance of American citizens. Controversy still rages over the Post and Guardian-U.S. working with stolen material, leaked separately to their news organizations by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The Post and Guardian-U.S. reporting recalled the prize awarded in 1972 to the New York Times for its work analyzing Daniel Ellsberg’s stolen, secret Pentagon Papers—in that case recounting the deception of the public by several administrations related to Vietnam policy. That honor to the Times long has been considered among the Pulitzers’ finest moments.
Among other landmark Public Service Prizes in this century was another to the Post in 2008 for graphically exposing shameful conditions for injured war veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. That work still resonates as other Veterans Administration scandals have arisen. Two Gulf Coast newspapers, the Times-Picayune of New Orleans and the Sun Herald of southern Mississippi, not only survived but thrived by serving their communities during the worst American hurricane season on record: 2005’s summer of Katrina. And the Boston Globe’s shocking exposure of priests as sexual predators and a cover-up of their crimes by the Catholic hierarchy has continued to ignite Church investigations and reforms since that 2003 Pulitzer was awarded.
Going further back, the most famous gold medal of all is arguably the best known of the Pulitzer Prizes: the Washington Post’s 1973 prize honoring the Watergate coverage led by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. But usually the Pulitzer links to history are more obscure, even if their effect was powerful. As early as 1921, the now-defunct Boston Post won for exposing Charles Ponzi as a financial charlatan. Its reporting made the “Ponzi scheme” a metaphor for the get-rich-quick mania of the Roaring Twenties while helping coin a popular term for a type of fraud we still know today.
The book’s focus on this stellar reporting from the past has won
Pulitzer’s Gold fans among journalism teachers. “Many scholars have argued that aside from the Watergate era and the muckraking period, there was little investigative reporting taking place in the 20th century,” wrote Indiana University’s Gerry Lanosga in one review of the original edition. “Harris’s research reveals that investigative reporting has been a persistent force in American journalism, though he does not remark upon that important finding.”
1 So let me remark here: Yes, this century of Pulitzer winning by news organizations proves that public interest journalism—usually by teams of reporters and editors—has powerfully served communities and remains a potent force for good.
A danger that cannot be ignored today, however, is that serious financial pressures within the news business could force American public service reporting to
become history. When
Pulitzer’s Gold was first published, the
Economist’s 2006 “Who Killed the Newspaper?” cover story was fresh in my mind.
2 Somewhat overstated in its headline—yet still too close for comfort—it talked of “once-great titles” then facing a possible digital death. It quoted a Carnegie Corporation report that asked if the American press was “up to the task of sustaining an informed citizenry on which democracy depends.”
3 The
Economist story was prescient in some ways—calling attention, for one thing, to the fast-growing online presence of the
Guardian in the United States.
Traditional newspapers, still at the center of the Pulitzer journalism awards, have continued losing readers since then amid steadily worsening finances. And more ownership shifts and many more stumbles in combining online and print operations lie ahead. Yet the examination of recent Pulitzer Public Service Prize winners reveals inspiring successes by reporters and editors—often as they overcome newsroom turmoil with ingenuity, energy, and the efficient use of technology. Those achievements deserve attention too, and they get it here.
After preparing a riveting series that explored how frequently South Carolina women are murdered by men in their lives, Charleston’s Post and Courier in 2014 broke what was once a cardinal rule of newspaper publishing. It put the entire project on the Internet in advance, making it available to social media before its five parts ran in the daily print version. The Post and Courier—whose 2015 gold medal work is discussed in the afterword—thus found a much larger national audience for the serious issue of spousal abuse.
What of the challenges to the Pulitzer organization itself? Such questions range from its role in making the media overly award-conscious
4 to the fairness of its treatment of women journalists.
5 But mainly the prizes must improve their ability to recognize the best American journalism in a fast-changing media world. And that mission still involves encouraging excellence by example, as Joseph Pulitzer intended when he created the prizes in the will he left when he died in 1911. The Pulitzers moved slowly to accept online material, first allowing entries from “digital-only” enterprises in 2009.
6 Only in 2015 was magazine work allowed to enter Pulitzer competition in the investigative and feature writing categories, even though all such journalism competes among the mushrooming number of readers who get their news from computer and cell phone screens.
Sometimes, news organizations have learned business lessons while in the middle of their award-winning work. “Hurricane Katrina was our great digital wakeup call,” says the
Times-Picayune editor Jim Amoss, who led the staff’s remarkable coverage after the storm drove the newspaper from its New Orleans headquarters. Without access to presses, it had no choice but to publish online only, something the Pulitzer board noted in awarding the 2006
Times-Picayune prize. “Two years ago, when we shifted our focus to digital journalism and reduced home delivery to three days, it was a dramatic change,” Amoss said in 2014. “But those days of Katrina had already blown open the window to our future. Whether they’re getting their news from the
Times-Picayune or from our website, NOLA.com, our readers have a voracious appetite.” Staffers “know we need to satisfy it, at all times and on all platforms.”
7 And the addition in recent years of a second publication in town, the
New Orleans Advocate, has brought competitive pressure too while giving online and print readers even more resources.
The long-term swing away from print, however fast it moves, is sure to continue based on the economics of print and digital, according to Paul Steiger, the former
Wall Street Journal managing editor who became the founding editor of the not-for-profit, Web-based investigative powerhouse ProPublica in 2007. Steiger, whose reporters often collaborate with newspapers on projects, says, “In the next recession I would be astonished if many more papers didn’t close their print editions. I hope it’s not soon.”
8Of the 103 gold medals awarded through 2015,
Pulitzer’s Gold examines the latest sixteen in detail. Reaching back to the earliest prize in 1918, it then follows a trail of winners up through today. The cases chosen represent their historical era particularly well or spotlight important reporting styles or trends in coverage. Other winners get briefer treatment in the appendix. As much as
Pulitzer’s Gold is about the past, it is designed to serve journalism’s future. And that future is its students. In a March 2014 Yale seminar, Bob Woodward got an encouraging result when he had the class study the dramatic
Washington Post Walter Reed reporting—Pulitzer Gold Medal–winning work that embarrassingly caught the military hospital system unprepared to treat the soldiers coming back from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. “Students were blown away by the work, and the emotional impact after seven years is undiminished. Some almost cried,” he says, adding: “It is one thing to talk abstractly about the importance of living in the scene, spending months and picking hard targets invisible to some. It is another to have this powerful example. These great works of journalism can live on and do not exist just in some dust-covered binder or museum.”
9This book exists to inspire current and future journalists with just such examples.
Roy J. Harris Jr.
Hingham, Massachusetts
October 2015