How the Pulitzer Prizes are chosen

a blog by Rich Oppel

Editor of The Austin American Statesman
and Co-Chair of The Pulitzer Prize Board
published June 8, 2008

On May 29, I handed out certificates to winners of the 21 Pulitzer Prizes for 2008, a privilege normally reserved for the president of Columbia University. But Lee Bollinger could not attend and, as co-chairman of the Pulitzer Prize Board, I was his stand-in.

For these winners, the occasion probably follows only marriage, a college degree or a huge promotion as an important life event - and for some, the Pulitzer might exceed even those milestones.

Henceforth, whatever achievements or misfortunes might lie ahead, a recipient's name regularly will be preceded by the felicitous three-word modifier "Pulitzer Prize winner "" The phrase will slip into footnotes, speech introductions, letters to the editor, reviews of a winner's book and, ultimately, his or her obituary. Maybe even a mortgage application or a plaintive e-mail asking for a raise.

No one person, not even the chairperson, speaks for the Pulitzer Prize Board in matters of policy. But in this crowd of 240 people - which included 21 winners (or winning groups) and Jesse Dylan, who accepted a special citation in music for his father, Bob Dylan, as well as their families, friends and editors - I found myself describing how the prizes are chosen.

In each of the 21 categories, there is a jury of three to seven members, depending on the number of entries, which might range from 50 to 350. The jurors are distinguished in their fields and include past Pulitzer winners.

The journalism juries work through the stacks of entries in the World Room of Columbia's Journalism Building for two or 21/2 days in March. Except for the editorial cartoons jury. In my days as a juror, the cartoons jury wrapped up its work by 4 p.m. on the first day and headed for a hotel bar. Prize administrator Sig Gissler tells me that a more industrious cartoons jury now works into the second day.

American-Statesman cartoonist Ben Sargent won the Pulitzer in 1982, and Ken Herman of our Washington bureau was the lead reporter when the Lufkin Daily News won the meritorious public service Pulitzer in 1977.

The arts and letters juries begin their work much earlier and take weeks and months to sift through the entries. Each jury presents the board with three unranked finalists.

The board begins its judging in December when Gissler alerts us to the 15 book finalists: three each in fiction, nonfiction, history, biography and poetry. We are wise to finish reading by mid-March, when the journalism finalists arrive. This can be a daunting task when the histories are as expansive in concept as a 2005 finalist titled "Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South." I'm not a fast reader, so the two volumes, totaling 1,202 pages, tested me. The history, which actually was quite good, occupies a sturdy shelf in my library today.

It would be wrong to say that brevity informs my love of poetry more than the weight of thought or the beauty of verse, but when the Ides of March approach, I don't object to terse verse.

In late winter, we receive finalists in music and drama. We read scores and listen to CDs of the music, while reading scripts and scrambling when possible to see the plays. No year was more enjoyable than this year, when we saw such plays as the winning "August: Osage County" and then watched our decision ratified by huge Broadway crowds. That doesn't always happen.

The board operates in secrecy. Former Pulitzer Board Chairman Bill Safire acknowledged the paradox five years ago: "Here we are, a pack of journalists eager to root out the truth and academics pledged to academic freedom, engaged in a conspiracy to operate in the dark. In hashing out the pros and cons of each entry for an award, board members can be frank, open, unguarded in our internal debates because we trust each other not to blab."

We 19 or 20 board members come from large newspapers and small newspapers. We are a diverse group by background - editors, columnists, authors, news agency executives, historians, deans and other academics - and by race, ethnicity, sex and education. During eight years on the board, I have watched the selection of new board members focus on men and women who can report, edit or write. They are accomplished in their crafts and have reputations for integrity and judgment.

The road to lead the board is not strewn with the bodies of rivals. This is a self-perpetuating board that selects its successors. Co-chairman Jay Harris, who holds the Wallis Annenberg Chair at the University of Southern California, and I both came onto the board in 2000. It is the custom, unless we really screw up, to share leadership in the ninth and final year. Then we disappear with not the slightest residual influence over board decisions.

Occasionally some blogger will accuse the board of attempting to "send a message," saying that it is political or engages in logrolling. We never send messages. I have not seen one instance of lobbying by a board member. We operate under strict conflict-of-interest rules: If a board member works for the same newspaper chain, or serves on the same departmental faculty, or even is a close friend of a finalist, he or she leaves the room. Afterward, that person learns of the decision - and nothing more.

The board makes no pronouncements about the state of journalism and usually limits its actions to the release of the names of winners by the administrator on those fateful Mondays in April. Yet as former Chairmen Paul Steiger of The Wall Street Journal and Michael Pride of the Concord (N.H.) Monitor have noted, a close observer of the Pulitzer process could safely conclude several things.

Clarity of sourcing is important. A reader should be able to tell whether the writer witnessed something, drew a picture from interviews or borrowed someone else's facts.

Newspapers should be able to compete irrespective of size.

The board responds to change, but we move slowly so as not to cast aside the lessons of history and tradition. We have merged online journalism into all journalism categories, and we have watched as entrants in the breaking news category have changed profoundly with the rise of the Internet. We have broadened music to ensure that recognition is not restricted to classical music with roots in Europe, now taking notice of other, authentically American forms such as jazz.

World history is reflected in the prizes. The journalists raise the mirror first, dig for the truth and provide preliminary assessments. Those winners in arts and letters, as former Chairman John Carroll once put it, have a longer gestation but render judgments and truth powerfully in their own idioms. Journalists, authors, playwrights and composers did this through the past eight years as we witnessed the darkness of Sept. 11; wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; terrorism; floods, fires and hurricanes; tensions over trade and immigration; and genocide.

This year was a classic example of a robust press at work. At few times since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and, later, World War II, have we seen government so obsessed with secrecy. In the face of that, this year's Pulitzer winners pushed back to protect the nation's freedoms.

The Washington Post's six Pulitzers alone are impressive testimony. We saw that newspaper's exposure of mistreatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Work by The New York Times and Chicago Tribune brought to light dangers lurking in medicines and other consumer products imported from China, and faulty government regulation of consumer products. The Post pulled back the curtain of a secretive, powerful vice president, and examined the workings of an American security firm in Iraq that operates beyond the reach of the law. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel examined how local officials skirt tax laws to pad pensions of county employees.

These revelations were matched by the richness of photography, commentary, features and basic local and breaking news.

In arts and letters, we enjoyed a rare abundance of quality poetry and awarded two prizes, to Robert Haas and Philip Schultz ; a fresh voice in fiction in Junot Diaz ; and a play by Tracy Letts that is comedic, complex and of excellence.

We read a wonderful biography of a man who might otherwise have been lost to the years, Amos Bronson Alcott , Louisa May Alcott's father, by John Matteson ; a revisionist history of the United States' expansion into the West by Daniel Walker Howe ; a detailed account by Saul Friedlander of Adolf Hitler's persecution of the Jews made possible by newly revealed records; and a choral masterpiece in music by David Lang . And we were delighted to give a special citation in music to a man who is a lasting 20th century figure - and now a 21st century figure - Bob Dylan, both a musician and poet.

Collectively, the work sets a standard for excellence and for aspiration by journalists and artists. Yet, as board members, we hope a Pulitzer Prize will be a beginning, not a final wreath on a winner's head, as this year's recipients join the ranks of the nation's finest authors, playwrights, composers, poets, writers, historians, columnists, cartoonists, photographers and reporters.

The three-word modifier "Pulitzer Prize winner " is, as former Chairman Henry Louis Gates Jr. said a few years ago, "something like a Homeric epithet, and to become one is to have ascended to an American pleiad, an aristocracy of excellence."