Veteran newspaper editors Joann Byrd and Mike Pride named new co-chairs of the Pulitzer Prize Board

Columbia University
Office of Public Affairs

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Media Contact:
Sig Gissler, (212) 854-3841 or sg138@columbia.edu
Melanie A. Farmer, 212-854-9082 or mf2362@columbia.edu

New York, April 26, 2007 — Columbia University today announced that Joann Byrd, most recently editorial page editor at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and Mike Pride, editor of the Concord Monitor, have been appointed the new co-chairs of the Pulitzer Prize Board. Byrd will chair the fall Pulitzer board meeting and Pride the spring meeting. Both have been board members since 1999 and replace Paul E. Steiger, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal and vice president at Dow Jones & Co., who served on the Pulitzer Board since 1998. Members of the board serve a maximum of nine years.

Byrd, a newspaper editor for 47 years, is currently writing a book about the Heppner, Oregon, flood of 1903. Prior to her retirement in June 2003 from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Byrd was ombudsman at The Washington Post and had been executive editor of the Herald in Everett, Washingon, for 12 years. She was a reporter and assistant city editor at the Spokane Daily Chronicle before joining the Herald. Byrd won the 2003 Society of Professor Journalists June Anderson Almquist Award for Distinguished Service to Journalism and was inducted into the University of Oregon Hall of Achievement in 2000.

Mike Pride has been editor of the Concord Monitor since 1983 and previously served as its managing editor. Under his guidance, the Monitor has garnered numerous national awards including the New England Newspaper of the Year Award, which it received 19 times.

Before joining the Monitor, Pride served in the U.S. Army in the 1960s and was city editor of the Clearwater Sun and the Tallahassee Democrat. Pride, a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, won the National Press Foundation's Editor of the Year Award in 1987 for directing the Monitor's coverage of the Challenger disaster and later won the Yankee Quill Award for contributions to New England journalism. He is the co-author of My Brave Boys, a Civil War history, and Too Dead to Die, the memoir of a Bataan Death March survivor. Pride taught a presidential politics course at Gettysburg College and has also been a lecturer and tour guide at the College's Civil War Institute.

The 2007 Pulitzer Prizes were announced on April 16. An awards ceremony honoring this year's winners will take place on May 21 at Columbia University, which administers the annual awards.

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