Pulitzer Prize Luncheon Remarks 2007

Low Library, Columbia University – May 21, 2007

Mike Pride

On behalf of the Pulitzer Prize Board, welcome to this glorious occasion.

A writer, journalist and teacher died this past winter in my neck of the woods. His name was Donald M. Murray, and he was a renowned writing guru from the University of New Hampshire and a columnist for the Boston Globe. His motto was "Nulle dies sine linea" - never a day without a line. In 1954, at the age of 29, Don won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. In one of his memoirs, he wrote that the Pulitzer didn't really change his work life. After the congratulatory cigars in the boss's office, he went back to his keyboard to pound out another editorial. But from that tender age forward, he knew that everything he wrote was being written by a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Welcome to Don Murray's world. I am certain that it has occurred to you that, henceforth, every newspaper story or book or play or poem you write, every musical piece you compose, every photograph you take, will be the work of a Pulitzer Prize winner.

But I know you will live up to this distinction because along with the other members of the Pulitzer Prize Board, I know your work. It has met the highest standards that can be applied by our board and the scores of jurors who help us. It has survived a field of entries that included the best work of hundreds - thousands - of talented people.

Although I have been on the board for eight years, this is my first Pulitzer Prize lunch. Sig Gissler, our faithful and hard-working administrator, tells me that Pulitzer Prize winners always like to hear a little bit about our inner workings. We have a mysterious process by design. I don't think I'm violating my oath of secrecy when I repeat the words uttered most emphatically, in my time on the board, by Bill Safire: "What happens in this room - STAYS in this room," he liked to say. Paul Steiger, our excellent outgoing chair, refers to efforts to penetrate the Pulitzer process as Kremlinology.

So, a little bit of Kremlinology, aimed at giving you some sense of the direction of the board. "Direction" may, in fact, be too strong a word - as it was in the gray world of the Kremlin. The Pulitzer Board adheres strongly to tradition - as it should. But the world is changing rapidly, and the Pulitzer Prizes must change with it.

This year, for the first time, we had animated political cartoons among the finalists. This is the latest development in a trend of accepting more online material in the Pulitzer journalism entries. I expect this trend to accelerate, and the board is eager to accommodate it. The challenge is how to do that without departing from our core mission, which is to honor the best in newspaper journalism each year. But it would not surprise me if, very soon, the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting went to an entry that appeared entirely online.

We continue to try to broaden the range of submissions for the Music prize. We have approved posthumous Special Citations this year to John Coltrane and last year to Thelonius Monk. Our Music winner this year is a free-jazz composition and live performance by Ornette Coleman. Because our board - wisely, I think - moves slowly on most issues, I can give you no insight into what comes next in our effort to make the prize more representative of a wider array of American music. But I can tell you that the board considers this an important work in progress.

Since becoming co-chairman of the board, I have told several interviewers that I hope the board will make it easier for small and medium-size newspapers to compete. I still remember years ago when our paper, the Concord Monitor, which is about 20,000 circulation, won a New England regional public service award. Our winning entry was a series on mental patients released from the state hospital in Concord. In a city of 32,000 people, 1,400 former mental patients were suddenly let loose with little money, almost no affordable housing and no services to help them live. Our series exposed the desperate conditions in which these former patients were living. The large-paper New England award that year went to the Boston Globe for its stories on corruption in the subway system, known as the T.

In accepting the award, the leader of the Globe Spotlight team began by saying that his team of a half dozen reporters had researched the allegations of corruption in the T for six months before even deciding to DO the series. When our reporter gave his acceptance speech, he said, "The managing editor told me to take my typewriter home for three days to write this series, and when they tell you at the Concord Monitor to take home your typewriter, you had better come back with something good."

The challenge for the Pulitzer Prize board is to create an opportunity for small and medium-size newspapers to compete regularly for at least some prizes with newspapers that have far vaster resources. We must do this without lowering our standards. And we intend to do it without creating a lower-tier Pulitzer Prize based on circulation. This is a difficult challenge, but we are working on it.

Finally, a word about the most worrisome subject in daily journalism today: the economic realities of the world in which we are trying to uphold our standards. I went to a meeting recently at which the editors of two metropolitan newspapers discussed the layoffs and buyouts and changing ownership situations at their papers. This is the story, and the worry, to differing degrees at every newspaper in the country, as we struggle to find the Holy Grail - the new economic model that will preserve and enhance our institution.

I went home from that meeting feeling dark, and I e-mailed one of the editors, Ann Marie Lipinski of the Chicago Tribune, and shared my gloom. Ann Marie, who also serves on the Pulitzer Board, shot back an answer that said what I have always known: It makes no sense - and does no good - to be anything but optimistic. Think about it, she wrote. We just gave a Pulitzer Prize to a novel about the post-apocalyptic world, and the Pulitzer Board realized in considering this work that it was really a book about the optimism of a father and son who have lost almost everything. It was a book about hope.

I think you can be optimistic, too, about going on with your work with the Pulitzer Prize label attached to your name for life. But judging from Don Murray's experience, being a Pulitzer winner won't make things easier.

Five days before he died at the age of 82 - 53 years after he won his Pulitzer Prize - Don's final column ran in the Boston Globe. It included these words: "Each time I sit down to write, I don't know if I can do it. The flow of writing is always a surprise and a challenge. Click the computer on and I am 17 again, wanting to write and not knowing if I can."

Of course, Don Murray could still write. And I am certain that all of you will continue to produce strong work and to uphold the highest standards of your craft or art.

Congratulations and thank you. I am honored to be in your presence today - and honored now to introduce another member of the Pulitzer Prize board, the president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, who will present the 2007 Pulitzer Prizes.