2009 Pulitzer Prize luncheon remarks

Low Library, Columbia University – May 28, 2009

Anders Gyllenhaal

Executive Editor, The Miami Herald
Chair, The Pulitzer Prize Board

It is my pleasure to welcome you to an afternoon that I think you will always remember. On behalf of the Pulitzer board and the staff that quietly works behind the prizes -- and also of the many friends and family members here today -- let me start by adding one more congratulations on your remarkable work.

Our purpose today is wonderfully simple – to honor your accomplishments with a piece of paper that will define your work from here forward. You will find this is a low-key gathering. That’s because the prizes themselves have come to have such weight we let them do most of the talking.

Today, you join a list of writers, composers, poets and journalists who we study in school, whose books fill libraries, whose work has shaped our world:, Faulkner, Hemingway, Gershwin, Joplin, Eudora Welty, Walter Lippmann, Alice Walker, Tennessee Williams, Sylvia Plath, August Wilson, Robert Frost, Wynton Marsalis, Tom Friedman.

It’s quite a club and there will be times when you feel some pressure as a member. More than one winner has discovered how difficult it can be to get back to the keyboard – piano or computer -- and to take on what’s next.

The best story I’ve heard about this came from former Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll, who tells of the day when reporter Acel Moore won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in Philadelphia in 1977. The newsroom staff gathered around for speeches and champagne. Acel’s phone kept ringing, with people offering congratulations. At one point, it rang and he picked up, assuming it was another well-wisher. It was a funeral home, calling with an obituary.

He stood there for a moment, wondering whether he still had to do obituaries, not the highest calling in the newsroom. But then he sat down, got ready and told his caller, “Lay it on me.’’ In one way or another, you’ll all face that moment. Our advice is to take the obit.

I do want to tell you a little about what has led up to this day, how the board and juries work, and make some observations about the decisions this year.

Altogether, there were more than 2400 books, plays, music compositions and journalism entries that competed for the 21 prizes. Nowhere else is the critical review -- the weighing, vetting and debate -- over literature, music, drama and reporting and photography anything like what is done here.

The work for 2008 started more than a year ago. We settled on 102 jurors, made up of the leading practitioners, critics, and past Pulitzer winners. (This is the moment to let you know that you’re not just leaving with a Pulitzer Prize today; you’re also taking home the privilege of serving on future juries)

Three to seven jurors are dedicated to each category. For letter and drama, jurors read all the books, or poems, or plays nominated in their category and winnow them down over the course of the year to three finalists. For the music, jurors listen to a range of compositions before nominating the three finalists.

For the journalism prizes, the reading is compressed into three intense days. The country’s leading editors and writers meet in early March, divide into groups for each of the 14 categories and sit down at a tables spread out through the Columbia Journalism School, facing more than a thousand entries, sometime piled so high it’s hard to see across the tables. After three days, the pile is down to 10 or 15, then 5 or 6, and then just three.

All these finalists then go to the Pulitzer Board, 19 editors, publishers and academics – including Nick Lemann, dean of the journalism school, and Columbia President Lee Bollinger, who you’ll hear from shortly.

The board meets the week before the announcement to make the final decisions, having read and listened to everything – a story unto itself. There’s a long tradition that the debate held in the school’s World Room never goes outside its doors. But I think anyone can see that this year was weighted down by changes unlike any that have come along in years.

Many of the institutions behind your work are facing dramatic shifts in readership, finances, technology. This year has seen an explosion of change, including everything from bankruptcy for some newspapers, to the coming of age of an online world of information that is having huge impact on this work.

All sorts of questions flow from this: How does the arrival of online-only news sites shape the best journalism of the year? How is the craft of writing affected by electronic reading devises, like the Kindle? How does the work of new media stack up against traditional media? How does the unique power of still photography fit into a video world? What even constitutes the publication of music in an era dominated by downloads. How does the craft of poetry fare in a time where there’s hardly the patience to read?

There aren’t many clear, simple answers. But here are a couple of conclusion you can draw from this year.

The quality of the work throughout the arts and letters is as strong as it has ever seen. This is a year when some of the modern legends of American fiction -- Tony Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, the late John Updike -- completed important new books. And yet our juries chose what may be the next legends, Minnesota’s Louise Erdrich, New York’s Christine Schutt and, of course, Elizabeth Strout, of Charlotte and New York, who today will accept a prize for her magnificent book, Olive Kitteridge.

Biography, history and non-fiction were all rich in contenders. This was one of the most impressive years for drama, when finalists ranged from the Broadway hit “In the Heights’’ to our winner, Lynn Nottage, for “Ruined.’’ And for those of us worried about the future of poetry, there has not been a better year in a decade, in part because of the return visit of William Merwin, who won a Pulitzer Prize 38 years ago and accepts his second today.

The story in journalism is more complicated – and worrisome. There surely is an impact of the reduced staffing and curbed ambitions of newspapers. When papers are fighting for survival, and cutting staffs by more than a third in many newsrooms, how will they deliver the kind of journalism that takes months to produce? There’s no doubt there will be less. Where does this lead, and how does it serve community, are questions we all should be thinking about.

And yet if you were to read every one of these finalists – which I’d recommend if you have a little extra time (winners are all on the website) – you would conclude that journalism is as vital as ever. That applies from the hugely impressive body of work that won the New York Times five Pulitzers – which says a great deal about the Times’ commitment and its leadership role in journalism – to some of the smallest papers, including the Las Vegas Sun’s Public Service award, the Post-Star of Glen’s Falls, N.Y. editorial writing and the East Valley Tribune in Mesa, Arizona, for its local reporting.

There was a delightful cartoon, drawn by the Scranton cartoonist, John Cole, making the rounds earlier this year, that showed the Pulitzer announcement under the heading, April 2012, Columbia University. The cartoon showed a desk stacked with awards for Facebooking, Blogging, Texting. The curator, who looks a little too much like Sig Gissler, is saying: “And this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Tweeting goes to…’’

It’s a good joke, but there is, of course, a huge set of questions that come as journalism becomes a patchwork of print, online, mainstream and start ups. Is the quality of work itself following readers to the web? Are the new tools of digital journalism going to have true impact? For four years, the prizes have been open to work published online, but this year was the first when entries were accepted from online-only sites – and dozens applied.

Much of that work was impressive, but it needs to be said that startup online sites are not yet delivering the kind of probing, authoritative work that journalism in service to communities should be about. There was one online-only finalist, though not a winner, from Politico’s superb cartoonist Matt Weurker. Conversely, newspaper websites, though supposedly embracing the web as a key to the future, remain inconsistent and often uninspired in making full use of their online powers. There are exceptions, the most noticeable being the St. Petersburg Time’s ambitious fact-checking project Politifact, essentially an online venture that won the Pulitzer this year for national reporting.

Our hope is newspaper standards and online technology will create new combination that will begin to produce the kind of exceptional work recognized at this luncheon. Online journalism has already sped up the pace of things, pushed innovations and spawned a great deal of creativity. The Pulitzer institution, sometimes viewed as traditionalist, is very much focused on how to encourage and recognize the best of what is coming.

Joseph Pulitzer couldn’t have known what he was creating with his gift back in 1904 that established these prizes, but he did something unique in that will. Nowhere else do the disciplines you represent come together as they do under the Pulitzer umbrella. The crafts of writing and creating in all their forms, woven together in these prizes, is one of the reasons they have such meaning. Another is the careful stewardship Columbia University has provided over the past 92 years. And the final reason for the impact of this recognition is the astounding force of your collective work, which this year surely lifts the bar a little higher.

Once more, congratulations. It is a privilege to be with you. And now let us welcome Columbia President Lee Bollinger.