Paul Tash, CEO of Tampa Bay Times, elected chair of Pulitzer Prize Board

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Media contact:
Eric Sharfstein, es3106@columbia.edu, 212-854-6164

New York, N.Y., May 15, 2013 -- Paul C. Tash, a local news reporter who rose to become the chief executive of Florida’s leading newspaper, the Tampa Bay Times, has been elected chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board, Columbia University announced today.

Tash, chairman and CEO of the Times Publishing Company, replaces co-chairs Gregory Moore, editor of The Denver Post, and Thomas L. Friedman, foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times. Board members serve a maximum of nine years while a chair serves for only one year.

A native of South Bend, Ind., Tash graduated summa cum laude in 1976 from Indiana University. He received a Marshall Scholarship and graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor of laws degree from Edinburgh University in Scotland in 1978.

He started with the Times that fall as a reporter covering local news. He went on to cover state government in Tallahassee and served as city editor, metropolitan editor, Washington bureau chief and, ultimately, editor of the Times. From 1990-91, Tash was the editor and publisher of Florida Trend, a statewide business magazine owned by Times Publishing.

Tash is chairman of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a school for journalists and media leaders, which owns Times Publishing. He was a Pulitzer Prize journalism juror four times before becoming a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board in 2005. Tash also serves on the boards of the Associated Press and the Committee to Protect Journalists. He is a member of the Florida Council of 100, a group of business leaders.

In 2012, Tash received the Distinguished Alumni Service Award from Indiana University, and he was recently inducted to the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame.

Tash is married to the former Karyn Krayer of St. Petersburg, a high school teacher. They have two daughters; one is a physician at Duke University Medical Center, the other a student at Duke Law School.

The Tampa Bay Times is Florida’s largest newspaper, with an average Sunday circulation of 400,000. Widely considered among the country’s best newspapers, it frequently wins major journalism awards.

Often a finalist in the Pulitzer Prize competition, the Times has won nine Pulitzers, including two in 2009, for Feature Writing and National Reporting. The latter award honored the paper’s creation of "PolitiFact," a fact-checking system focused on politics. In 2013, the Times won a Pulitzer for Editorial Writing after campaigning to restore fluoridation to the county water supply, which serves 700,000 residents.

Until 2012, the newspaper was known as the St. Petersburg Times, but changed its name to reflect its growth throughout the Tampa Bay region.
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The Pulitzer Prizes, which are administered at Columbia University, were established by Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian-American journalist and newspaper publisher, who left money to Columbia University upon his death in 1911. A portion of his bequest was used to found the School of Journalism in 1912 and establish the Pulitzer Prizes, which were first awarded in 1917.