The 2018 Pulitzer Prize Board. (Photo by Bruce Gilbert/Columbia University)
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Media Contact:
Megan Mulligan, [email protected] or 212-854-3841
New York, N.Y. (July 20, 2018) — Columbia University announced today that Robert Blau, executive editor of projects and investigations at Bloomberg News, and Steven Hahn, professor of history at New York University, have been elected as co-chairs of the Pulitzer Prize Board.
Blau and Hahn succeed Washington Post Associate Editor and Columnist Eugene Robinson, who served as 2017-2018 chair.
Blau, a New York City native, has carved an eclectic path up the journalistic ranks. He wrote about music, reviewed movies and covered the police beat, before turning his attention to investigative reporting and editing. Following a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University in 1997, he began overseeing all major enterprise at the Chicago Tribune, including its years-long probe of the failures of the criminal justice system in Illinois, which yielded numerous reforms and was emulated by news organizations across the country. In 2004, he was named managing editor of the Baltimore Sun, where he helped reengineer a web-first newsroom and led the paper's award-winning journalism. Blau joined Bloomberg News in 2008, where he directs a global team of investigative reporters and feature writers in collaboration with Bloomberg Businessweek magazine. Its projects have forced unprecedented transparency from the Fed, documented the human cost of the mining and cotton industries, and revealed how hedge funds recently exploited the Brexit vote. During his career, the stories Blau has shepherded have won numerous journalistic accolades, including the Polk, Loeb, Investigative Reporters and Editors, Goldsmith, Overseas Press Club and Pulitzer prizes. He is the author of "The Cop Shop," a memoir of covering crime in Chicago. He serves on the Nieman Foundation advisory board.
Hahn is a professor of history at NYU and a historian of the United States during the 19th century, of slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic world, of African-American history and the history of popular politics. Before joining NYU, he was on the faculty of the University of Delaware, the University of California, San Diego, Northwestern University and the University of Pennsylvania. He has also received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the ACLS, the NEH, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and the Huntington Library. Hahn has been awarded the Bancroft Prize in American History (2004), the Merle Curti Prize in Social History (2004), the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize (1984) and the Allan Nevins Prize (1980). In 2004, he won the Pulitzer Prize in History for “A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration.”
Both Blau and Hahn joined the Pulitzer board in 2011.
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.
The 19-member board is composed mainly of leading journalists or news executives from media outlets across the U.S., as well as five academics or persons in the arts, including the president of Columbia. The dean of Columbia’s journalism school and the administrator of the prizes are nonvoting members. The chair rotates annually to the most senior member or members. The board is self-perpetuating in the election of members. Voting members may serve three terms of three years for a total of nine years.