Pulitzer Prizes

Yesterday, as the news of the Pulitzer Prizes drifted out into the media, the mood at the New York Times was relatively somber. True, the paper had won a prize, for Andrea Elliott's series on an imam in Brooklyn, but had not turned up as the winner in any other category—which, for a paper that's grown accustomed to multiple awards over the years, must have been a bit of a sting. In fact, it kind of was. In a speech to the newsroom after the awards were announced, Bill Keller had the following to say:

About once a year, on this day, I find myself wondering why we treat this particular prize with champagne and speeches, while other accolades are celebrated with beer and e-mails. Shouldn't the Polk Award Lydia Polgreen accepted last week for her courageous and incisive coverage of Darfur fill us with the same pride as the honors handed out today? How is it that Tyler Hicks was voted Newspaper Photographer of the Year by a jury of leading American picture editors, but neither Tyler nor any of our amazing photo staff is a finalist for today's prizes?

I don't mean to sound ungrateful. I'm just saying prizes, like newspapers, are put out by human beings.

Early last month, based on a list assembled (not completely correctly, as it turned out) by Editor & Publisher, Gawkers Balk and Choire sat down to handicap the Pulitzer race. [UPDATE: YES EDITOR & PUBLISHERS WAS ALMOST COMPLETELY CORRECT, FINE, STOP EMAILING US. (Apparently the prize board moved some things or something.) ANYWAY WE HAIL YOU, GREG MITCHELL AND STAFF, YOU ARE PULITZER KINGS!!] Well, the prizes have been awarded. How'd we do?

Well, look at that. The Pulitzers have been announced, and they certainly have spread the wealth: the Wall Street Journal wins two, but no other paper gets more than one, including the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, which each win one. The Washington Post gets completely goose-egged, though the paper had finalists in several categories. (Complete list here.) Interestingly, the Daily News editorial board wins for editorial writing "for its compassionate and compelling editorials on behalf of Ground Zero workers whose health problems were neglected by the city and the nation." That's great for the DN and all, but it's a slap in the face to the newsroom, which, you'll recall, got slammed by the New York Times in February for not doing its due diligence on the story of a supposed "first responder" to the scene who later fell ill, which then led to some newsroom mudslinging as the news side felt abandoned by editorial. Look who's come out on top now!

The Pulitzer Prizes: 2007 Winners [Pulitzer.org]
Earlier: 'Post' Flacks Kick 'Daily News' When It's Down

So! Today at 3 p.m. the Pulitzer Prizes are being announced in an always-anticlimactic ceremony at Columbia. But we're hearing that the New York Times has won only one award this year, for Andrea Elliott's series "An Imam In America." Undoubtedly there are some grim faces on West 43rd Street this afternoon. No awards for Iraq or Darfur reporting, or that Pulitzer-bait series on ineffective hick judges in upstate New York? Complete list of winners TK shortly, of course.

Yesterday, in what is becoming an annual tradition, Editor & Publisher revealed a leaked list of Pulitzer finalists. Two Gawker editors, who hereby affirm at the outset that they have read almost none of the nominated stories in question, sat down today to handicap the awards. Their predictions are lengthy, ill-informed, and almost certain to be incorrect. Still, it's Friday afternoon and you need something to print out for your train ride home. Why not this?

• Three years ago today, the Times published its Jayson Blair, and things went from bad to worse for Howell Raines (and from good to better for Seth Mnookin). [E&P;]
• A short (and very Maer-friendly) history of Radar magazine. [NYRM]
• Incoming Pulitzer chairman Paul Steiger wants more focus on online web-based journalism. We'll be waiting for our public-service award. [E&P;]
• The coolest kids at the Ellies didn't go black tie. [WWD (second item)]
• Even more Reege, now on NBC, too. Sigh. [B&C;]

• Does it count as a New York magazine stunt if no one notices, or cares? [Romenesko]
• ASME elects new prez and veep; new prez and veep promptly make Bush and Cheney jokes. [WWD]
• Lachlan Murdoch has a second son; Choire Sicha promptly begins lusting for him. [Advertiser]
• WSJ editor Paul Steiger named chairman of Pulitzers board. This will have no practical effect on you in any way. [NYT]

• Pulitzer winners lunch together -- before the awards are announced! Scandal! [E&P;]
• Morgan Stanley wants to end NYT Co.'s two-tiered stock structure, which keeps the Sulzbergers in control. Much as we like to make fun of the Sulzies: Dear God, are these people insane? [TheStreet.com]
• A day after the Times discovers sponsored copies of the Daily News, it also learns of staff upheavals at the Village Voice. [NYT]
• New Penthouse will be more like old Penthouse -- and it'll be run by a chick. [MIN]
• The more he knows the more he knows how much more there is to know. [E&P;]

Sig Gissler, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, announces the winners. Actually, and disappointingly, he merely announces the winners are being announced. The World window, behind him, is the highlight of the experience.

If you pay attention to such things, you come to learn that the announcement of the Pulitzer Prizes each year follows an oddly quaint ritual. The prizewinners are announced in April, they are announced at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and they are announced at Columbia University. Oddly, they are not announced first on the Pulitzer Prizes website; they are not announced by a televised ceremony; they don't move over the AP wire at precisely the appointed time. Rather, they are announced at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism's ceremonial World Room, which contains the stained-glass window from Joseph Pulitzer's old New York World, and one would imagine there is some sort of puff of white smoke, or herald trumpets, or something portentous, to mark the news. This year, we headed up to Columbia to find out.

Your as-it-happens sloppy report: 3 wins for the Times, which is trumped by 4 for the Washington Post. Among the WaPo's chosen ones is resident fashionista Robin Givhan. Did you hear that, Styles? There's hope for you yet. Kind of.

New Orleans' Times-Picayune splits public service with Biloxi's Sun Herald; Times-Picayune also scores breaking news, as expected. The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof wins for commentary -- sex traffickers around the world weep. Joan Didion does NOT win for biography.

Related: Two Gulf Coast Newspapers Share Pulitzer [NYT]

The funny thing about the Pulitzer Prize announcements is that while there's a big deal made about how they're kept secret until the moment they're announced -- not via TV or wire but the old-fashioned way, up at Columbia at 3 p.m. -- they're usually a pretty poorly kept secret. (This is not terribly surprising: Scores of journalists are involved in the selection process -- on individual juries, on the Pulitzer Board -- and journalists are the worst leakers of them all.) The rumor we've persistently heard through the afternoon is that the Times will take home a mere three prizes while The Washington Post will be the big winner with four.

Is it true? Who knows. We're hopping on the train up to 116th Street; we'll let you know when we do.

Earlier: Today in Pulitzer History: Bill Keller Wins Prize, Respects Others' Feelings

Today's the biggest day on newspaperland's calendar. No, not when Johnny Apple submits his novella-length list of itemized deductions to the IRS but rather when Columbia University announces the Pulitzer Prizes, promptly at 3 o'clock this afternoon. To mark the occasion, Editor & Publisher asked a bunch of former prizewinners where they were when they heard the news. Some of our favorite reporters are included in the roundup -- Maureen, the News's Bill Sherman, who apparently used to cover boring-but-worthy things like Medicare fraud before becoming the paper's Jared Paul Stern reporter -- but, frankly, their stories are all fairly boring. (It's a Tolstoyan thing, we imagine: Happy reporters are all alike; every unhappy reporter is unhappy in his own way.) We were stopped, however, by this intriguing story from top Timesman Bill Keller, who won in 1989 for international reporting:

I was in Cuba, covering Mikhail Gorbachev's summit with Fidel Castro. I called the foreign desk to check in after our plane reached Havana, and learned that editors had been quaffing champagne in my honor. This was before the Internet era of no surprises, so I'd been completely oblivious to the fact that it was the day the Pulitzers were announced.

I went out to dinner that night with another reporter and didn't tell him my news. I think he's always taken my silence for supreme modesty, but, honestly, I was just too flustered to know how to bring it up.

And that little flustered, modest, angsty foreign correspondent grew up to be the paper's first emo executive editor. Big surprise.

Where Were You When You Heard You Won a Pulitzer? [E&P;]
Earlier: Weekend at Judy's: Part One, in Which Bill Keller Gives Warm Fuzzies

• As expected, the Times dumps its unwatched Discovery Times channel. [Media Mob/NYO]
• Did Bill Keller's gin-heiress wife kill Boldace? Probably not, but she sure didn't help. [WWD (second item)]
• We love conflicts of interest; the Pulitzers board, not so much. [E&P;]
• Forbes media kibitzer James Brady wonders, "Is Cosmo editor Kate White the smartest dame in the business?" Of course she is, Jim. Until you find someone else to slobber over next week. [Forbes]
• New Yorker fashion director Michael Roberts moves to Vanity Fair, presumably preferring a publication that does little things like fashion spreads. [Media Mob/NYO]

• New York to anoint hot young editors; those photographed rumored to include TNR's Franklin Foer, The Atlantic's James Bennet, Roger Hodge of Harper's, and the Paris Review's Philip Gourevitch, who, at 44, calls the whole conceit into question. [Media Mob/NYO]
• The Times nominated Dargis for a Pulitzer, and no one there understands why; New York is pitching a Look Book book. [WWD]
• The Washington Post gets 88 New York Timeses every day, costing $18K annually. At least it's nice to know someone other than us isn't getting free papers. [WCP]
• Cargo was confused, and nobody will miss it. Um, yeah. [Slate]
• Bob Woodruff, the ABC anchor badly wounded in Iraq, last night received the Radio and Television Correspondents Association's David Bloom award, named for the NBC correspondent who died while covering the early days of the Iraq war. [B&C;]

• That Times front-pager on Saturday about the Iraqi prisoner who was photographed robed, hooded, wired up, and quasi-crucified at Abu Ghraib? Yeah, well, they maybe didn't get the right guy. [Salon]
• One bit of good news on Cooper Square? Voice art critic is said to be a Pulitzer finalist. [Arts Journal]
• Times announces it will stop publishing daily stock listings; a five senior-citizen amateur investors give a shit. [NYT]
• Al-Jazeera can't get U.S. distribution for its new English-language channel. Imagine that. [NYS]

• Can't wait for the Pulitzers announcement to find out the finalists? (See, officially they don't announce the finalists till they announce the winners.) Good thing E&P; has its annual samizdat list. [E&P;]
• Recently unemployed Absolute editor Andrew Essex is even more recently un-unemployed, sliding into a consulting gig at Rodale for Men's Health and Best Life. Prominent chins, we understand, are the new rich. [WWD]
• Are the good guys winning in the Knight Ridder auction? Wow. [NYT]
• Things at Newsday aren't even worse than you thought, if you bother to pay attention to such things. [NYP]
• Bill Powers wants anchor elections: America's Next Top Anchor? [National Journal]