Campaigning for The Pulitzers

By Laurence Zuckerman

When reporters and editors are not busy comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, as the saying goes, they are probably meeting somewhere to honor each other for having done so. By the reckoning of the trade magazine Editor & Publisher, more than 250 journalism prizes now reward every specialty from criticizing art to writing on arthritis. For all the glut of awards, though, the Pulitzer Prize remains the one trophy able to bestow a career-boosting mystique that glows past retirement on a newspaper reporter's resume. Like the Oscar, a Pulitzer is good for business, instantly improving the reputation of a small or medium-size paper or ratifying the status of a titan. In short, it is a glory to fight for, and journalists do.

This week the Pulitzer Prize Board meets at Columbia University to anoint 1988's winners. The prizes are also given for music, drama, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, history and biography, but it is the 14 journalism awards that will have champagne corks poised in anxious newsrooms. Before the bubbly flows, just one question: Is there a trick to winning? Members of the Pulitzer board insist there is none, but that has not stopped newspapers from playing shamelessly to the judges.

The process sometimes starts before the story. John Kolesar, now managing editor of the Courier-Post in Cherry Hill, N.J., recalls sitting on a committee at the Bergen Record to draw up a list of criteria for selecting projects that could win a Pulitzer. The Miami Herald a few years ago dispatched an editor to Manhattan to check out winning entries and how they were packaged. The choice of a hot subject can be helpful; AIDS and TV evangelists were popular this year. Prizemanship strategies have even built up a genre of newspaper writing: the exhaustive multi-part investigation. "A lot of stories are handled now in series form that might have been handled in day- to-day coverage," says San Francisco Examiner Executive Editor Larry Kramer, a screening juror this year.

Reporting, writing and publishing a potential winner are merely the beginning. To narrow the final choices of the board, 65 men and women prominent in the field were divided into five-member juries that winnowed a record 1,708 journalism entries this year and recommended three choices for a given category. Jurors have only three days to read hundreds of thousands of words. To get the judges' attention and stand out in the tonnage, newspapers sometimes run ads in trade publications, and editors have taken to distributing reprints of their papers' articles to colleagues at other shops.

The entries are often elaborate productions. If a prize were given for the most overblown submission, the Arizona Republic might be a winner. It sent a scrapbook slightly larger than a full newspaper page (the board's expressed size limit), complete with a movie-poster-style cover. Inside, a five-page letter sang the praises of the Republic series on mismanagement in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and a thick stack of documents attested to the story's impact. "Next year I'm automatically going to vote against any entry that weighs more than I do," joked one weary reader. Juror Alan Moyer admits that some cover letters are "obviously trying to influence the jurors." He should know. It was Moyer, as the Republic's managing editor, who oversaw his paper's extravaganza of an entry. (He did not judge the entry, however; jurors and board members must recuse themselves when their paper or another paper in the same chain is being considered.)

The secret deliberations by the Pulitzer board inevitably prompt gossipy speculation. Several times in recent years thwarted jurors leaked word that their choices for winners had been overturned. The board, which has absolute authority under the Joseph Pulitzer bequest, responded by resurrecting the rule that jurors should not name a favorite among the three recommended finalists. The 16 board members, who serve up to nine years, now include two women, two blacks (one is the chairman, Roger Wilkins) and an Asian American, a response to past charges that it was an all-white, all-male establishmentarian club. Robert Christopher, secretary of the board, insists that the days are long past when someone like the legendary New York Times Columnist Arthur Krock could strong-arm members into awarding a prize to a young politician named John Kennedy. But the suspicion of closed-door politicking endures. "My impression is that there is a fair amount of horse trading," says an editor whose paper is not a frequent winner.

The Philadelphia Inquirer is the prime model for those who believe there is a formula for getting the Pulitzer. The paper has scored 13 times since 1972, when Executive Editor Eugene Roberts took over; only the New York Times has done better. Roberts says that those in search of the Inquirer's secret have even asked him what color paper he uses for his submissions. Observers contend that the Inquirer has mastered the art of packaging a prize-minded story. It's a great newspaper, says former Washington Post National Editor Peter Osnos, but "sometimes it seems to me they don't edit for the readers, they edit for the Pulitzer committee." Of course, like most of those that actually capture a prize, the Inquirer delivers. "Get that good," says Board Member Robert Maynard, editor-publisher of the Oakland Tribune, "and I don't care who you are, you're going to win Pulitzers."

With reporting by Naushad S. Mehta/New York