Pulitzer thread

As sports editor at the Bristol paper, I'm not inclined to laugh at this. It's a long-gone issue for us at the paper (people who were more affected than anybody here, I'm guessing). It would be best that others followed suit as well.

Thanks for trying, however.

 

It's certainly a huge accomplishment and I can imagine how proud Todd Foster must be of his reporter today. But they're not the smallest.

Willemette Week in Portland won the investigative category in 2005.

In public service small(er) newspaper winners in the last 20 years have included the Grand Forks Herald (1998), Virgin Island Daily News (1995), the Washington (N.C.) Daily News (1990) and the Biloxi paper, which shared in it the 2006 award for Katrina coverage. There's also at least one weekly, The Tabor Tribune, that has won the public service award, although that was 50 some years ago. So, it's not unheard of.

Can't imagine what it must be like to have a Pulitzer in your late 20s though. Congrats to the Bristol paper.

 

On George Dohrmann's bio on SI, it says he was the last sportswriter to win a Pulitzer. I think he was mid 20s when he won at the Pioneer Press.

Kathleen Parker won for her columns? Hmmm.

 

I was on my phone and going by memory.
Try National Reporting. Couple links down.

And, Dohrmann was the last. He and Emilio Garcia-Ruiz took down Clem Haskins and Minnesota basketball when inside source Jan Gangelhoff went on the record saying she had produced hundreds of pieces of coursework for the basketball team.

 

Ah, well, your outrage was over the fact that the Toyota story didn't win for public service, and your query about whether I can read pointed me to the public service page. So obviously I should have known it was under national reporting. But I will take your phone excuse as an acknowledgement that I am in fact capable of reading. I appreciate your big heart.

Regarding the Times and Toyota -- I don't think you can say they were the driving force on that story. The driving force was actually when the NHTSA, in November, issued a stern public statement that Toyota lied by saying the agency had signed off on the idea that it was all about floormats. Many media companies took that cue that something was wrong, and the Times certainly did very nice work, but there were other parts of the story that popped up all over the place. Hard to say they owned that story.

If the Pulitzer methodology were "hey, let's find the biggest event and then find someone who covered that event with the most column inches" ... if that were the case, they might as well call in the judges from the APSE section awards.

 

Our paper, The Vicksburg Post in Mississippi, won a local reporting Pulitzer in 1954. A tornado hit the city and wiped out the paper's building. They somehow found a way to publish and were credited with quelling a lot of the rumors that were starting to spread around the city. Maybe not as grueling as what the coast papers did after Katrina, but enough to get that little glass paperweight.
Anyway, we're a 13K now. Not sure what we were in 1954. I'd have to think we're on the list of smallest dailies to win one, at least.

 

The initial L.A. Times story on the Toyota mess was in October, before the NHTSA statement. You're correct that parts of this story popped up all over the place, and I agree it's probably not Pulitzer-worthy, but the Times' coverage was very, very good.

 

Also begs another question: Every contest I've entered asks that entries submitted run during a specific time period. Did the Toyota story break during that time?

 

This is kind of fantastic...the Washington Times story on the winners somehow fails to mention any of the FOUR Pulitzers won by the Post.

Quite a reputable news source there.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/apr/13/journalist-for-times-was-finalist-for-pulitzer/

 

And as we've previously mentioned, the Hungry Horse News in Columbia Fall, Mont., is a Pulitzer Prize winning publication.

 

The Point Reyes Light, won the Public Service Medal in 1979 for a story on a drug rehab/cult group named Synanon. Their circ at the time was less than 2,000 and they were a weekly.
I sometimes wonder if the prize board doesn't go out of their way to spotlight a small paper, as reporters we usually root for a good story, in addition to acknowledging the WaPo and NYT.
The process always seems squirrelly to me - the judging panel submits their choices to the board (largely made up of NYT and WaPo poohbahs) and the board makes the final call.

 

Of course she did. She criticized conservatives. She's been the belle of the ball ever since.