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The Gap
Why Is the Pulitzer Club
Getting So Exclusive?
BY
BRENT CUNNINGHAM
So
what happened to the other 1,474 daily papers? The most common
reaction to the unprecedented sweep of the Pulitzer Prizes this
year by the big four dailies — led by The New York Times’s
seven prizes — is to blame it on an aberrant news year. The
biggest domestic story of the last sixty years landed, literally,
in the Times’s backyard, so of course it cleaned up. In fact,
all but five of the fourteen Pulitzers this year were related
to September 11 and its aftermath.
But there’s more to it than that. No matter how extraordinary
the events of last fall, this year’s Pulitzer dominance is
merely a spike in an otherwise steady trend: over the last fifty
years, a shrinking number of newspapers are winning a larger share
of Pulitzer prizes. cjr broke down the winners since 1950 and
found the following:
• The percentage of the prizes
garnered each decade by the top five winners has risen steadily
from 26 percent to 41 percent.
• Although the number of Pulitzers
awarded jumped from 85 to 140 as categories were added, the number
of winning publications remained virtually unchanged. Thus, the
number of papers winning multiple Pulitzers each decade has risen.
And, more telling, the share of the prizes going to those multiple
winners has gone from half in the ’50s to three-fourths in
the ’90s.
• No paper had won more than
eight Pulitzers in a decade, until the Times won ten between 1971
and 1980. But in the 1990s, three papers won ten or more —
the Times, seventeen; The Washington Post, thirteen; The Wall
Street Journal, ten.
Clearly,
if prizes can be seen as a certain kind of wealth, the rich are
getting richer. Does this mean the poor are getting poorer as
well? Caution is in order when extrapolating broad truths about
the health of U.S. newspapers from this trend. The Pulitzers are
but one measure of quality journalism, and the prize has been
criticized as too establishment-oriented, or skewed by Eastern
bias and elite connections. Nevertheless, the Pulitzers, more
than any other award, are the benchmark for newspaper excellence.
So how explain the fact that only four newspapers (the Times,
the Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Journal) can reasonably
expect to win at least one Pulitzer each year, and only another
seven or eight will win with any regularity?
“They are superior papers,” says Brian Toolan, editor
of The Hartford Courant and a Pulitzer juror the last two years.
“They hire well, they pay better than most everyone else,
they are located in interesting places, and they have missions
that are broader and more ambitious than most of us can afford.
All that adds up to spectacular journalism happening there with
some frequency.”
Another way to look at it is that this Pulitzer gap is symptomatic
of a growing quality gap between the top newspapers and the rest
of the field. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t excellent
work being done by small- and mid-sized dailies. The question
goes beyond the individual reporters and editors, to one of resources
and commitment to public service at the highest levels of the
organization.
“There is a quality gap and I fear it is growing,” says
Jay Harris, the former publisher of the San Jose Mercury News
and a member of the Pulitzer Board. “We’ve witnessed
it in the reduction of the number of papers with reporters in
D.C., with reporters overseas, or with the ability or willingness
to send them there. So many papers today rely on The New York
Times and the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post wires for virtually
all of their high-end coverage.”
We’ve witnessed it, too, in the disappearance of once-strong
papers from the ranks of Pulitzer winners. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
for example, won five Pulitzers in the 1950s and 1960s, but hasn’t
won since 1972. In the 1950s, The Des Moines Register won four
Pulitzers, two fewer than the Times. But since 1980 the Register
has won only three (the last coming in 1991), while the Times
has won forty. The Philadelphia Inquirer, meanwhile, won eleven
Pulitzers in the 1980s, and only one since.
It is hard to overstate the role that the corporatization of the
news business has played in widening this gap. So many newspapers
now are part of big media companies, often publicly traded and
profit-driven, and managed by executives with little or no connection
to the newsroom. Along the way, resources have been siphoned from
the newsroom, editorial missions dulled and narrowed, and most
papers find themselves in monopoly situations that tend to encourage
journalistic caution over risk-taking and aggressiveness.
“It used to be that there were papers across the country
that were better able to do the kind of journalism that wins Pulitzers
— to pay the staff, to train the staff, to have the newshole
that accommodates Pulitzer-caliber stories,” says Geneva
Overholser, a former Pulitzer juror and board member who edited
The Des Moines Register in 1991, when it last won a Pulitzer.
“That gap has grown as the Pulitzer gap has grown.”
Of course there are other factors in this growing concentration
of Pulitzer winners. With the emergence of The New York Times
as a real national newspaper (complete with doorstep delivery
coast to coast), for instance, and the development of the Internet,
which makes it possible to read the major dailies each day from
anywhere in the country, the big papers enjoy a bit of a headstart:
going in, Pulitzer judges have read their projects, or are familiar
with their columnists and reporters. “I love Maureen Dowd’s
column,” says Hartford’s Toolan. “So if I see it
lying there on a table of Pulitzer entries, maybe I am a bit more
eager to read it than one by a talented columnist from Laramie
who I’ve never heard of.” This year it was a talented
photographer from Hackensack, New Jersey, who many feel was snubbed.
Few quarrel with the excellence of The New York Times’s September
11 photography, but the outcry from the journalistic community
over the Pulitzer Board’s failure to give the prize to the
Record’s totemic firefighter photo from ground zero echoes
the more general concerns of editors like Gilbert Bailon at The
Dallas Morning News: “I know there is a lot more good work
going on in the country than is reflected in the Pulitzers,”
he says. “I’d like to see it recognized.”
Also,
with the addition of categories like criticism, the big papers
can load up on entries from talented critics covering world-class
subjects in architecture, film, theater, and music, whereas many
papers are lucky to have someone double up as a movie reviewer
in their spare time. In fact, since 1970, when criticism was added,
only thirteen papers have won that prize, and the only ones you
might not be able to guess were the Raleigh News & Observer
and the Boston Phoenix, both one-time winners.
And certainly there are other takes on this question of a newspaper
quality gap and the degree to which it is reflected in the Pulitzers.
Margaret Sullivan, editor of The Buffalo News, agrees that the
question of resources is vital, “but I am not convinced that
you need a huge staff and a huge travel budget to do excellent
work. It helps, but I don’t think you can draw a direct line.”
Nor can a direct line be drawn between the rise of corporate ownership
and the quality gap, says Robert Rivard, editor of the San Antonio
Express-News and a Pulitzer juror last year. “Corporate ownership,”
he says, “has played both a good role and a bad role. Every
time I hear someone recall the good old days of family ownership,
I am reminded of fifty family-owned papers that were horrible,
including this paper, and how much some of these papers have improved
under corporate ownership. But it’s a first world, third
world thing. The best are getting better just like we all are
getting better, so it’s relative.”
Yet clearly something more fundamental is happening here. How
many reporters go to work each day believing their paper could
win a Pulitzer? Sure, regional papers like The Oregonian and The
Dallas Morning News have become regular contenders; and every
couple of years a small paper makes an appearance, often the result
of a breaking news story in its community (the Grand Forks Herald
and the floods) or a hot national issue with a strong local strand
(the Rutland Herald’s editorials on gay marriage in Vermont).
But these are the exceptions that prove the rule. “It used
to be you could go deeper into a region’s newspapers and
find papers aspiring to do journalism that was of a quality where
people would say, ‘You should win a Pulitzer for that,’”
says Loren Ghiglione, dean of the Medill journalism school at
Northwestern and four-time Pulitzer juror. “Part of it is
resources, but that has led to a self-image problem.”
Listen to a couple of journalists who piped up in the wake of
the Pulitzers this year on Jim Romenesko’s MediaNews site:
“You can’t give a newspaper staff a Ford Escort, tell
them to race like a Ferrari and expect to come in first,”
says Forrest Brown, a copy editor at The Charlotte Observer, arguing
that the Pulitzers went to those papers that “put journalism
first and have done so for years.” Christine Black, a former
reporter with The Boston Globe and later with CNN, who now free-lances,
says: “The New York Times is not trying to get rid of every
reporter over the age of 45. Tom Friedman is not being told that
he cannot take a reporting trip to the Middle East because it
is too expensive. Metro reporters at the Post are not being told
to never use FedEx or make an overseas telephone call because
of the money.”
Some argue that the pursuit of prizes is not the best way to spend
limited resources, and they have a point. One Ohio publisher of
a 63,000-circulation paper says he could focus the bulk of his
staff and resources each year on a project designed to win a Pulitzer.
“But,” he asks, “would that really be serving this
community?”
Still, if the modern mandate for all but a few papers is intensely
local coverage, why is it that only three of the last ten public-service
Pulitzers went to papers with less than 200,000 circulation, with
the last four going to the Times, The Oregonian, and two to The
Washington Post? And why have only three of the last ten investigative
Pulitzers gone to papers with less than 400,000 circulation?
This year’s big-paper dominance generated some criticism
(and not just from the little guys) about the need to make the
Pulitzers more inclusive of good journalism at all levels. “If
this is the trend of the future,” wrote Howard Kurtz in The
Washington Post, “maybe the Pulitzers should follow the National
Magazine Awards and have different prizes for publications in
different circulation categories.” Even before this year,
there were those who felt the Pulitzers had become too concentrated.
In 1999, Max Frankel, the former editor of The New York Times,
wrote about the “Pulitzer paradox” in the paper’s
Sunday magazine: “Some provision urgently needs to be made
for papers of small circulation, which cannot normally compete
in costly investigations with resource-rich metropolitan dailies.”
That same year James Ottaway, Jr., chairman of Ottaway Newspapers
Inc., took up Frankel’s cry, sending a letter to Seymour
Topping, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, urging that
the board create a separate category for papers under 100,000
circulation — which would include 93 percent of all U.S.
dailies (and all the papers in the Ottaway chain, which is owned
by Dow Jones). “I thought the Pulitzers were meant to encourage
good journalism by all papers,” Ottaway says. “What’s
happening now is discouraging for smaller papers.”
Arguments for parallel Pulitzers effectively concede the fact
that a quality gap exists. But where would you draw the line in
subdividing the Pulitzers? Can papers with 5,000 circulation compete
with those with 100,000 circulation any more than those with 100,000
can compete with those with 500,000? For that matter, can papers
with 300,000 circulation compete with those with 1 million circulation?
(It’s important to note that, of the forty-three Pulitzer
finalists this year, only one, The Christian Science Monitor,
had circulation under 100,000, and only five others had circulations
below 200,000.) Maybe a better place to start is the criteria
the jurors use to choose the finalists in each category. As it
is now, there are no criteria for judging the entries. It is up
to the jurors and the board members to determine what makes a
piece distinguished. Perhaps something akin to the handicap system
used in golf could be applied to the Pulitzers, so that additional
weight is given to things like resources and mission.
Regardless, circulation is not the primary issue. Great journalism
comes in all shapes and sizes. “There are a handful of papers
that stand apart because their commitment to journalism in the
public interest is their top priority,” says Jay Harris.
“I think the number of papers with that as their top priority
has declined, and that is troubling.”
Brent Cunningham is CJR’s managing editor.
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