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Monday, May 2, 2016

MEDIA MONDAY /THE PULITZER PRIZES 2016

Joseph Pulitzer and his Prize
2016
Editor’s note: For a history of the Pulitzer Prizes see end of this blog.

Breaking News Reporting
Los Angeles Times Staff
For exceptional reporting, including both local and global perspectives, on the shooting in San Bernardino and the terror investigation that followed. Below are images of the victims of the massacre.


Investigative Reporting
Leonora LaPeter Anton and Anthony Cormier of the Tampa Bay Times and Michael Braga of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune
For a stellar example of collaborative reporting by two news organizations that revealed escalating violence and neglect in Florida mental hospitals and laid the blame at the door of state officials.

Explanatory Reporting
T. Christian Miller of ProPublica and Ken Armstrong of The Marshall Project
For a startling examination and exposé of law enforcement's enduring failures to investigate reports of rape properly and to comprehend the traumatic effects on its victims.

Local Reporting
Michael LaForgia, Cara Fitzpatrick and Lisa Gartner of Tampa Bay Times
For exposing a local school board's culpability in turning some county schools into failure factories, with tragic consequences for the community. (Moved by the Board from the Public Service category, where it was also entered.)

National Reporting
The Washington Post Staff
For its revelatory initiative in creating and using a national database to illustrate how often and why the police shoot to kill and who the victims are most likely to be.

International Reporting
Alissa J. Rubin of The New York Times
For thoroughly reported and movingly written accounts giving voice to Afghan women who were forced to endure unspeakable cruelties.

Kathryn Schulz
Feature Writing
Kathryn Schulz of The New Yorker
For an elegant scientific narrative of the rupturing of the Cascadia fault line, a masterwork of environmental reporting and writing.

Commentary
Farah Stockman of The Boston Globe
For extensively reported columns that probe the legacy of busing in Boston and its effect on education in the city with a clear eye on ongoing racial contradictions.


Criticism
Emily Nussbaum of The New Yorker
For television reviews written with an affection that never blunts the shrewdness of her analysis or the easy authority of her writing.

Editorial Writing
John Hackworth and Brian Gleason of Sun Newspapers, Charlotte Harbor, FL
For fierce, indignant editorials that demanded truth and change after the deadly assault of an inmate by corrections officers.

Jack Ohman
Editorial Cartooning
Jack Ohman of The Sacramento Bee
For cartoons that convey wry, rueful perspectives through sophisticated style that combines bold line work with subtle colors and textures.

Public Service
Associated Press
For an investigation of severe labor abuses tied to the supply of seafood to American supermarkets and restaurants, reporting that freed 2,000 slaves, brought perpetrators to justice and inspired reforms.


From left, New York Times photographers (from left) Daniel Etter, Mauricio Lima, Sergey Ponomarev and Tyler Hicks
Breaking News Photography
Mauricio Lima, Sergey Ponomarev, Tyler Hicks and Daniel Etter of The New York Times
For photographs that captured the resolve of refugees, the perils of their journeys and the struggle of host countries to take them in.

Feature Photography
Jessica Rinaldi of The Boston Globe
For the raw and revealing photographic story of a boy who strives to find his footing after abuse by those he trusted.
Jessica Rinaldi of The Boston Globe
Photography Staff of The Post and Courier, Charleston, SC
LETTERS, DRAMA & MUSIC

Fiction
The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove Press)
A layered immigrant tale told in the wry, confessional voice of a "man of two minds" -- and two countries, Vietnam and the United States.

Drama
Hamilton, by Lin-Manuel Miranda
A landmark American musical about the gifted and self-destructive founding father whose story becomes both contemporary and irresistible.

History
Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America, by T.J. Stiles (Alfred A. Knopf)
A rich and surprising new telling of the journey of the iconic American soldier whose death turns out not to have been the main point of his life.

Biography or Autobiography
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, by William Finnegan (Penguin Press)
A finely crafted memoir of a youthful obsession that has propelled the author through a distinguished writing career.

Poetry
Ozone Journal, by Peter Balakian (University of Chicago Press)
Poems that bear witness to the old losses and tragedies that undergird a global age of danger and uncertainty.

General Nonfiction
Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, by Joby Warrick (Doubleday)
A deeply reported book of remarkable clarity showing how the flawed rationale for the Iraq War led to the explosive growth of the Islamic State.

Music
In for a Penny, In for a Pound, by Henry Threadgill (Pi Recordings)
Recording released on May 26, 2015 by Zooid, a highly original work in which notated music and improvisation mesh in a sonic tapestry that seems the very expression of modern American life (Pi Recordings).

History of The Pulitzer Prizes

By Seymour Topping with additional editing by Sig Gissler

In the latter years of the 19th century, Joseph Pulitzer stood out as the very embodiment of American journalism. Hungarian-born, an intense indomitable figure, Pulitzer was the most skillful of newspaper publishers, a passionate crusader against dishonest government, a fierce, hawk-like competitor who did not shrink from sensationalism in circulation struggles, and a visionary who richly endowed his profession.

His innovative New York World and St. Louis Post-Dispatch reshaped newspaper journalism. Pulitzer was the first to call for the training of journalists at the university level in a school of journalism. And certainly, the lasting influence of the Pulitzer Prizes on journalism, literature, music, and drama is to be attributed to his visionary acumen.

In writing his 1904 will, which made provision for the establishment of the Pulitzer Prizes as an incentive to excellence, Pulitzer specified solely four awards in journalism, four in letters and drama, one for education, and four traveling scholarships. In letters, prizes were to go to an American novel, an original American play performed in New York, a book on the history of the United States, an American biography, and a history of public service by the press.

But, sensitive to the dynamic progression of his society, Pulitzer made provision for broad changes in the system of awards. He established an overseer advisory board and willed it "power in its discretion to suspend or to change any subject or subjects, substituting, however, others in their places, if in the judgment of the board such suspension, changes, or substitutions shall be conducive to the public good or rendered advisable by public necessities, or by reason of change of time." He also empowered the board to withhold any award where entries fell below its standards of excellence. The assignment of power to the board was such that it could also overrule the recommendations for awards made by the juries subsequently set up in each of the categories.

Thus, the Plan of Award, which has governed the prizes since their inception in 1917, has been revised frequently. The Board, later renamed the Pulitzer Prize Board, has increased the number of awards to 21 and introduced poetry, music, and photography as subjects, while adhering to the spirit of the founder's will and its intent.

Award changes beginning in 1997
The board typically exercised its broad discretion in 1997, the 150th anniversary of Pulitzer's birth, in two fundamental respects. It took a significant step in recognition of the growing importance of work being done by newspapers in online journalism. Beginning with the 1999 competition, the board sanctioned the submission by newspapers of online presentations as supplements to print exhibits in the Public Service category.

The board left open the distinct possibility of further inclusions in the Pulitzer process of online journalism as the electronic medium developed. Thus, with the 2006 competition, the Board allowed online content in all 14 of its journalism categories. For 2009, the competition was expanded to include online-only news organizations.

For 2011, the Plan of Award was revised to encourage more explicitly the entry of online and multimedia material, with the board seeking to honor the best work in whatever form is the most effective. And for 2012, the board adopted an all-digital entry and judging system, replacing the historic reliance on submission of scrapbooks.

The other major change was in music, a category that was added to the Plan of Award for prizes in 1943. The prize always had gone to composers of classical music. The definition and entry requirements of the music category beginning with the 1998 competition were broadened to attract a wider range of American music.

In an indication of the trend toward bringing mainstream music into the Pulitzer process, the 1997 prize went to Wynton Marsalis's "Blood on the Fields," which has strong jazz elements, the first such award. In music, the board also took tacit note of the criticism leveled at its predecessors for failure to cite two of the country's foremost jazz composers. It bestowed a Special Citation on George Gershwin marking the 1998 centennial celebration of his birth and Duke Ellington on his 1999 centennial year.

In 2004, the Board further broadened the definition of the prize and the makeup of its music juries, resulting in a greater diversity of entries. In 2007, the music prize went to Ornette Coleman for "Sound Grammar," the first live jazz recording to win the award. The Board also awarded posthumous Special Citations to jazz composers Thelonious Monk in 2006 and John Coltrane in 2007.

Award Controversies
Over the years the Pulitzer board has at times been targeted by critics for awards made or not made. Controversies also have arisen over decisions made by the board counter to the advice of juries. Given the subjective nature of the award process, this was inevitable. The board has not been captive to popular inclinations. Many, if not most, of the honored books have not been on bestseller lists, and many of the winning plays have been staged off-Broadway or in regional theaters.

In journalism the major newspapers, such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and  The Washington Post, have harvested many of the awards, but the board also has often reached out to work done by small, little-known papers. The Public Service award in 1995 went to The Virgin Islands Daily News, St. Thomas, for its disclosure of the links between the region's rampant crime rate and corruption in the local criminal justice system.

In 2005, the investigative reporting award went to Willamette Week, an alternative newspaper in Portland, Oregon, for its exposure of a former governor's long concealed sexual misconduct with a 14-year-old girl. In 2008, the feature photography prize was captured by the Concord (N.H.) Monitor for its portrayal of a family coping with a parent's terminal illness. In 2010, the Public Service prize went to the Bristol, Va., Herald Courier, a small daily, for exposing the mismanagement of natural gas royalties owed to thousands of landowners. And in 2013, the National Reporting prize was won by InsideClimate News, a small online news organization.

In letters, the board has grown less conservative over the years in matters of taste. In 1963 the drama jury nominated Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," but the board found the script insufficiently "uplifting," a complaint that related to arguments over sexual permissiveness and rough dialogue.

In 1993 the prize went to Tony Kushner's "Angels in America: Millennium Approaches," a play that explores homosexuality in the early days of the AIDS crisis, before transmission was widely understood or effective treatment was available. Kushner doesn't shy from strong language, a change from earlier playwrights whose cursing could have cost them an award.

On the same debated issue of taste, the board in 1941 denied the fiction prize to Ernest Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls," but gave him the award in 1953 for "The Old Man and the Sea," a lesser work.

Notwithstanding these contretemps, from its earliest days, the board has in general stood firmly by a policy of secrecy in its deliberations and refusal to publicly debate or defend its decisions. The challenges have not lessened the reputation of the Pulitzer Prizes as the country's most prestigious awards and as the most sought-after accolades in journalism, letters, and music. The Prizes are perceived as a major incentive for high-quality journalism and have focused worldwide attention on American achievements in letters and music.

Announcements
The formal announcement of the prizes, made each April, states that the awards are made by the president of Columbia University on the recommendation of the Pulitzer Prize board. This formulation is derived from the Pulitzer will, which established Columbia as the seat of the administration of the prizes.

Today, in fact, the independent board makes all the decisions relative to the prizes. In his will Pulitzer bestowed an endowment on Columbia of $2 million for the establishment of a School of Journalism, one-fourth of which was to be "applied to prizes or scholarships for the encouragement of public service, public morals, American literature, and the advancement of education."

In doing so, he stated: "I am deeply interested in the progress and elevation of journalism, having spent my life in that profession, regarding it as a noble profession and one of unequaled importance for its influence upon the minds and morals of the people. I desire to assist in attracting to this profession young men of character and ability, also to help those already engaged in the profession to acquire the highest moral and intellectual training." In his ascent to the summit of American journalism, Pulitzer himself received little or no assistance. He prided himself on being a self-made man, but it may have been his struggles as a young journalist that imbued him with the desire to foster professional training.


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