PICKING THE PULITZERS

BY BILL DEDMAN
Dedman received the 1989 Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting for articles in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on racial discrimination by lenders. A former staff writer for The Washington Post, he is writing a book on computer-assisted journalism.

It can be stated as a general rule that if you send in your entry stapled upside down in the binder, you lessen your chance of winning a Pulitzer Prize. Beyond that mishap from the Manhattan, Kansas, Mercury, it's less clear what ensures success here in the World Room at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, where sixty-five jurors plow through 1,610 entries to choose forty-two nominees for journalism's highest award.

But finding the best work is only half the task of the Pulitzer jurors. Our other, unstated, function is to keep the prize from being tarnished by an embarrassing flap when the fourteen Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters, writers, columnists, cartoonists, and photographers are announced.

With both those goals in mind, here are one juror's observations on what goes on at the high altar of American journalism. We gather at 9:00 A.M. Monday, March 4, under the stained-glass portrait of the Statue of Liberty transplanted from Joseph Pulitzer's World. We are fifty-three men and twelve women, fifty-two whites and thirteen minorities. Most are senior editors, a few are reporters. Among us are sixteen Pulitzer winners. Those of us who have served as jurors before can see at a glance that, with the absence of Dave Barry, the cocktail party conversation this year will be less enjoyable than last, but at least we have Molly Ivins.

The tables are stacked high with binders. The total is down 9 percent from last year's record number, either because journalism declined or because budget-cutting papers decided to save a little on the $ 20 entry fees. The shortest odds are in International Reporting, with only fifty-nine entrants, and the longest again this year are in Commentary, with 216 competitors.

For some entries this won't be the first read. New York Post editor Jerry Nachman doesn't send me many letters, but on February 15, just after the names of the jurors were released, he mailed me a reprint of "Children of the Damned," a "disturbing" look at children of crack-addicted mothers, articles that happen to be entered in two categories.

Disturbing is a good work for Nachman's lobbying; another might be "tacky." But jurors presume that other lobbying or horsetrading, less blatant but more effective, must happen at a higher level, where their recommendations are sometimes overruled by the nineteen luminaries on the Pulitzer Prize board.

Before beginning our reading we hear brief instructions from Pulitzer administrator Robert C. Christopher: Choose three nominees ("no more and no fewer"). List them in alphabetical order, with a brief statement in support of each. Our nominations are purely advisory and can be discarded by the board ("although the board does not do so lightly"). "All other things being equal, the Pulitzer board always urges jurors to try to reward individual effort." And the most strongly stated rule, prompted by controversies of the past: "It is not part of a jury's function to indicate any order of preference among its three nominations."

Christopher adds that the staff tries not to place jurors on panels in which their paper is entered, but it happens often because many papers enter every category. So we are told to leave the room when entries from our paper are discussed; we may do so for entries from competing papers at our discretion.

Those instructions don't cover every possibility, as we quickly find when we begin our deliberations at table number 5, Beat Reporting. Issue No. 1: THE SNAKEPIT

Potential conflicts are everywhere: employers judging previous employees, employees judging previous (and prospective) employers, friends judging friends, enemies judging enemies. And those are just the conflicts we can see.

At my table, St. Petersberg Times editor Andrew Barnes recuses himself from reading the stories of a New Haven Register reporter who had been covering Yale University's takeover fight with Barnes's newspaper. Chicago Sun-Times editor Dennis A. Britton decides he shouldn't read the work of the media critic who used to work for him at the Los Angeles Times, nor does he read the Chicago Tribune's technology writer. I decide (with great regret) to avoid the sixty-pound entry (with Supplement A and Supplement B) from Scripps Howard's Andrew Schneider, a personal friend with whom I have dinner plans tonight.

Here's an entry from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, fine stories by Martha Shirk on the failure of coroners to detect child abuse. The accompanying letter of praise is signed by William F. Woo, editor of the Post-Dispatch, who is seated at the next table judging Editorial Writing and whose own columns are being judged upstairs in the Commentary category. That alone is not unusual; nearly everybody here has horses in the race. Our eyebrows did rise, however, when we read the author's bio at the back of the entry: "Martha Shirk lives in St. Louis with her husband, William F. Woo, editor of the Post-Dispatch." As one juror says, "You'd think the managing editor could have signed that letter."

Judging Pulitzer entries is like trolling at a singles bar: our task is not to judge the merits of every entry, but simply to determine if there are others we like better.

We begin by scanning for benchmarks. A juror who likes a candidate points it out to others, who read it next. Each juror marks yes or no on each entry: a single yes is enough to keep it on the table through the first cut. Entries that receive five no's are pitched on the floor, where they pile up like carcasses in a slaughterhouse.

Letters of recommendation, when not from the entrants themselves, do sometimes illuminate the work, pointing out obstacles overcome or reforms initiated. Unfortunately, the letters are frequently better written than the articles that follow. "The New York Times writes glorious letters," a juror says. "They should win a prize for that."

Occasionally an entry is accompanied by letters of condemnation. The day after the Stamford, Connecticut, Advocate submitted stories of contracting irregularities in the installation of the emergency 911 system, the Pulitzer staff received a letter, signed by several Stamford city officials, opposing the articles as unfair and unworthy of a Pulitzer Prize. ("They must be great stories," one juror said.) Still later came an addendum to the story: a follow-up Advocate article saying a disciplinary investigation had begun of city officials, including several who signed the letter to the Pulitzer staff. Issue No. 2

TIME

There isn't time to read every word. The average jury completes its work in fourteen hours over two and a half days. (The Editorial Cartooning jury usually goes home first.) That average allows seven minutes per entry per judge. Actually we spend much less on most entries and closer to half an hour on the final few.

(That doesn't include time for bathroom breaks and petitioning. The members of this year's Editorial Writing jury, not content to judge seventy expressions of opinion, circulate their own -- a petition opposing the Pentagon's reporting restrictions. No more than ten jurors sign.)

One effect of the time constraint is a distaste for Jell-O -- Jell-O leads, that is. "If you haven't told me what the news is in the first six grafs, you've lost your chance," one juror says. For the second year, I hear jurors swear an oath to get to the point. "If we don't read it, how can we expect readers to?" a juror says.

My impression is that jurors try to judge each entry fairly in the time allowed. Juries can take more time if needed, but often finish early. Issue No. 3: CATEGORIES A lot of table talk is devoted to sorting out boundaries. What, exactly, is Beat Reporting? That category, previously called Specialized Reporting, was changed this year to emphasize the need for sustained daily reporting. But among the 144 entries this year were many collections of columns, single investigative efforts, and six-month projects.

Is The Boston Globe's series on child labor, researched by a labor reporter over several months, an example of beat reporting? We decide it isn't, then are glad to hear it is nominated in National Reporting.

And who can we judge the beat coverage of The Wall Street Journal's national energy correspondent when the entry includes only four stories filed after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait?

It may be good to advise entrants, although it will increase the weight of entries, that besides the articles in each entry they may include as many other articles as they like, from any year, as supplementary material. It might save a juror from having to read a bio to determine if this subject is on the author's beat.

Although further definition of categories might help, vagueness allows for more variety. It's good that there is a place for the Minneapolis Star Tribune's beat on the historical context of current events and for The Orange County Register's new beats: traffic and shopping malls.

And I wonder how the jurors at the next table, in Explanatory Journalism, are able to compare USA Today's entry -- a diagram of what happens to luggage after it is checked at the airport -- with The Washington Post's series on the state of the Soviet army.

The only solution here is flexibility. Several times I hear jurors say, "Our job is to find the best work on the table, whatever the category." Issue No. 4: THE LINDA GREENHOUSE EFFECT

Linda Greenhouse of The New York Times may cover the Supreme Court superbly, and someday she may win a Pulitzer Prize, but I doubt she had much of a chance this year. Her entry was discussed for about five minutes at the Beat Reporting table, but that time was devoted to the 1989 abortion rights march. As everyone knows, Greenhouse marched to the steps of the Supreme Court, not as a reporter but as a participant. She was reprimanded by the Times; some thought she should be removed from the beat; and reporters across the country were reminded of old rules. I don't know about the other jurors, but I know that her march influenced my opinion. I suspect that, with the competition as strong as it was and with another Times entry already having support around the table, she would not have made the finals, march or no march. But I also suspect that the march kept anyone from protesting when her work went on the refuse pile in the first round.

If it can hurt a competitor to be too familiar to the judges, it more often helps. "I don't have to read these stories; I read them when they came out in The Wall Street Journal," says a juror, who reads them again anyway.

I believe jurors try hard to look for quality work from smaller papers, and several such entries make the finals each year. Issue No. 5: JUDGING IN A VACUUM

Our juror goody bag includes a copy of the March/April issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. I don't read the magazine until I get home from the judging. On page 9 is a letter to the editor from Jeff Cohen, executive director of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, in which he says FAIR has challenged the methodology and accuracy of articles by David Shaw, media critic for the Los Angeles Times, particularly his series alleging a pro-choice bias in abortion coverage in the press.

I know no details of FAIR's criticisms and have no idea if they are valid or substantial or merely ideological, but it nags at me a little that I learn of them after we have chosen Shaw as one of the three nominees in Beat Reporting.

If Shaw's editor had included FAIR's critique in the entry, with a proper rebuttal, it would not necessarily have diminished his chances. William K. Marimow of The Philadelphia Inquirer has given credit to a Philadelphia Bulletin columnist for inadvertently helping the Inquirer win the Pulitzer for Public Service in 1978. "We ran articles on cops beating the smithereens out of suspects, and week after week the Bulletin columnist ran a point-by-point attack on our article," Marimow said. The Inquirer included the columns in its submission.

In the World Room jurors often ask: How do we know these stories are true? Were questions raised about them? Were corrections published? Have they resulted in libel suits or settlements? Was another paper ahead on the story?

Last year, on the Investigative Reporting jury, some of us left the table to make phone calls to check the clips to see which paper led the way on a story. I know of a juror who did the same this year, checking a magazine article and calling a journalist to resolve a vague doubt that was causing an entry to be rejected.

Usually these questions cannot be resolved in the time available or, to be more precise, they are resolved: anything risky goes on the floor.

The current system may value safety over genius, but it isn't possible for jurors to recognize all the risks. Too often the right questions won't occur to jurors, nor to the members of the Pulitzer board, until after a prize is awarded and an embarrassing controversy flares.

Perhaps what's needed is a little more openness. Two proposals:

A sales pitch from the editor is nice, but it might help if entrants were asked to fill out a form -- dates published, documents and records relied upon, hurdles overcome, the reporter's beat, and some tough ones: Were any questions raised about the truth or accuracy of this report? What are the rebuttals? Were corrections published or libel lawsuits settled? Such a form would give jurors one more piece of paper to read, but it would also give them more information and comfort. Announce the nominees after the judging and before the board chooses the winners. Since many nominees find out anyway that they are on the list sent to the board, an earlier announcement won't prompt any more raised hopes or second-guessing -- or lobbying -- than already occurs. (Perhaps it's only a coincidence that The New York Times played on the front page articles by nominee Natalie Angier on April 4 and April 5 , the two days the board was meeting in New York to choose the winners.) But it will allow someone with information or criticisms to step forward. Of course, it will also put pressure on the board to choose winners from among the jurors' recommendations.

If these proposals were adopted, board members would have to put up with a few more letters from public officials and interest groups. But wouldn't it be better to receive those letters before, not after, they award our highest honor?

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