Mike Pride (Submitted)
Mike Pride is the new administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, Columbia University announced Tuesday. Pride, the former editor of the Concord Monitor “led his small New Hampshire newspaper to national prominence and served as co-chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board,” according to the press release.
Pride, 67, became editor of the Monitor in 1983 after serving as managing editor. Under his leadership the Monitor won the New England Newspaper of the Year Award 19 times, as well as numerous national awards for excellence. The paper was cited by Time magazine and the Columbia Journalism Review as one of the best papers in the country. In 2008, the Monitor won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography.
“Mike Pride is the ideal candidate to take the Pulitzer Prizes into their next phase,” said Danielle Allen, a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and the Pulitzer Board chair who led the search committee that tapped Pride. “He is committed to a free press and community journalism as pillars of democracy. He is a warm person of sound judgment and inspiring creativity. His deep experience with the Prizes equips him brilliantly to help us navigate the new while also steering a course true to our original values.”
According to the press release, Pride joined the Pulitzer board in 1999 and has been a Pulitzer juror four times.
From his 2007 Pulitzer bio:
Before joining the Monitor, Pride served in the U.S. Army in the 1960s and was city editor of the Clearwater Sun and the Tallahassee Democrat. Pride, a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, won the National Press Foundation’s Editor of the Year Award in 1987 for directing the Monitor’s coverage of the Challenger disaster and later won the Yankee Quill Award for contributions to New England journalism. He is the co-author of My Brave Boys, a Civil War history, and Too Dead to Die, the memoir of a Bataan Death March survivor. Pride taught a presidential politics course at Gettysburg College and has also been a lecturer and tour guide at the College’s Civil War Institute.
Pride replaces Sig Gissler, who announced his retirement from the position in January. Gissler first started his role as administrator in 2002.
In January, Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon reported that Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study’s Danielle Allen led the search committee for the new administrator.
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