Interview
Excellence is the Only Guidepost

Seymour Topping, a former managing editor of The New York Times, has been the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes since 1993. He is retiring July 1 and will be succeeded by Sig Gissler, a professor at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and a former editor of the Milwaukee Journal. Topping was interviewed by Brent Cunningham, CJR’s managing editor.

How do you explain the growing concentration of Pulitzer winners over the last fifty years?

I think that is more a commentary on the state of American journalism than on the Pulitzer process. As far as the Pulitzer process is concerned, the standard of criteria is excellence. When the Pulitzer Board reviews an entry, it doesn’t discuss the circulation of the newspaper — except possibly in Public Service — the location of the newspaper, the ownership of the newspaper, or whether or not the newspaper has won any previous Pulitzer prizes. Or for that matter, if it has already won a Pulitzer Prize in the current competition. The judging is based solely on excellence, comparative excellence.

Obviously, the larger newspapers, with talented staffs and greater resources that enable them to commit teams to projects or travel abroad, have a great advantage. At the end of the judging this year, I remarked to the board that it was regrettable that we didn’t have any prizes awarded to small newspapers. Everyone around the table agreed, but there wasn’t any move or opinion expressed that we ought to change the process to compensate for the preponderance of wins by larger and medium-sized newspapers. This stemmed from the belief of the current board, as well as other boards going back to 1917, that the over-riding criteria should be excellence.

Would you agree that there is a growing quality gap?

I find it somewhat difficult to generalize based on the Pulitzer experience. But I think that there is a gap, and probably a growing gap, between what the smaller newspapers can do and what the larger papers can do. It relates to many problems — budgetary mainly, and competition with other media. For example, small newspapers in some communities are up against cable competition that has cut very sharply into their advertising base, resulting in very tight news budgets. There are many factors.

But even given that reality, you still think the current approach to judging Pulitzers is valid?

There are competitions that do take into account size of circulation, and they serve journalism well. But as of now, the Pulitzer Board makes its contribution with its emphasis on excellence across the board.

Why not name the finalists?

That change was discussed by board members early last year, and also in 1994. The board never acted. I would not exclude the possibility that such a change will come up for consideration by the current board or future board. The Pulitzer Prize process is not set in stone.

There are factors that mitigate against publishing the finalists. One of them is partisan lobbying. I think the level of lobbying we are getting now has no real effect on the juries or the board. However, if you published the finalists I think there would be a great intensification of lobbying. And frankly, I don’t know what impact lobbying on that scale would have on the process.

The best argument for publishing the finalists is that it might surface information that could be useful to the board in making a decision. Having said that, in my nine-year tenure, I have not seen a single case where information has surfaced after the award that was so detrimental that the board regretted giving the award.

Another reason there has been some hesitancy in publishing the finalists in advance of the award is the public confusion that would result in these cases where the board exercised its present license of not making an award at all, or making an award to an entry other than those nominated. Last year, for example, the board wanted to see more entries than the three nominations in Commentary. So I returned to the jury and asked for further suggestions, and as a consequence the award went to Dorothy Rabinowitz of The Wall Street Journal, who had not been nominated. This year, in the investigative category, none of the three nominees won. The award went to The Washington Post story that dealt with the systematic abuse of deprived children in the District of Columbia. The board justifies such procedures — which it exercises only with a three-fourths vote — by the feeling that it has a broader outlook, an overview of all the entries and how they relate to one another, and other factors that are sometimes not available or apparent to all the jurors.

How do you balance the need for secrecy against the need for openness?

The Pulitzer Board is a journalistic organization, and therefore its procedures should be as open as possible. There has been some criticism of our procedures as being too secretive, but I would question that. When I brief the jurors, I do stress the need for confidentiality until there is an announcement of the winners, simply so that the whole process will not be encumbered by partisan lobbying, and also to avoid unnecessary pain to those individuals who might be disappointed if the board decides not to make a nomination or to shift a nomination from one category to another. However, I stress to the jurors that once an announcement has been made, they are perfectly free to discuss their deliberations openly, or write about them if they care to. As far as the board is concerned, there is a necessity for some of the conversations to remain privileged in order to assure uninhibited discussion, but the procedures themselves are public, and there is no effort to conceal them. I think that is quite an important point.