In a sense, it is a clash of two of the journalist’s most cherished precepts: devotion to the reader’s right to know and the safeguarding of information delivered in confidence.
Yet every March these two precepts collide, with distinct — if rarely discussed — ethical overtones. They conflict, perhaps ironically, during the supposedly secretive process of selecting the newspaper industry’s best work, the winners in the 14 journalism categories of the Pulitzer Prizes.
UPDATE: The winners of the Pulitzer Prize were announced on April 4. (Full list of winners and finalists here.) The “leaked” list of finalists published by Editor & Publisher — mentioned by Roy Harris in this article — turned out to be nearly all accurate; the only miss was in the Editorial Cartooning category, where the winner was not included in the leaked list. Ergo, one of the “leaked” finalists in that category was not actually a finalist. E&P’s list did not include predictions for the categories of Commentary, Breaking News Photography, and Feature Photography.
This March, the outcome of this “other” Pulitzer competition was the same it’s been for a decade now: The right-to-know won out, with hardly a tear for the confidentiality that was sacrificed.
PULITZER RUMORS
Fourteen panels of journalists serving as Pulitzer jurors — 77 in all — met in early March at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, signed secrecy pledges, and then reviewed the entries in their categories with an eye toward selecting three finalists. Yet the secrecy began unraveling within hours after the panels finished their work. And a day and a half later, an ad hoc assemblage of reporters calling itself the Cabal had pieced together a nearly complete finalist list, circulating it by e-mail to newsrooms around the country. For the third year, Editor & Publisher published its very similar list, confirmed by its staff, on its Web site.
A few discrepancies may be noted when the official roll of finalists and winners is read at 3 p.m. today in the journalism school’s World Room. But by then, it’s certain that new leaks will have sprung — leaks of actual winners, which could only come from among the 19 Pulitzer Board members, editors, and educators, for the most part, who meet over this weekend. From past experience, though, it appears clear that the Cabal and E&P will have again done their jobs well.
The Cabal’s track record
“It’s usually quite accurate. This year we got everything but one name,” says Deborah Howell, Washington bureau chief for the 26-paper Newhouse Newspaper chain and a founder of the Cabal about 10 years ago, she says, with former Newsday editor Anthony Marro. “A lot of people are members of the Cabal, though many of them change every year,” she says. Through newsroom contacts they learn jurors’ identities. “And the jurors who are very helpful to us in all this are respected journalists,” says Howell, who is scheduled to take over as ombudsman at The Washington Post later this year.
But even if they did their jobs well, did they do the right thing?
Pulitzer Prize administrator Sig Gissler is reluctant to say much about the premature disclosures. For him it is a simple matter. “The rule is that the jury proceedings are confidential, as are the results of them,” he says. “When there are leaks, we regard those as regrettable.”
Where Gissler is mum, though, others make the case for confidentiality in more depth.
“I don’t see any complexity at all to the issue,” says Poynter Institute dean Keith Woods, who chaired the seven-person jury that nominated last year’s Pulitzer commentary finalists. “It’s people basically lying and betraying a confidence.” Last year, he wrote about the jury experience glowingly, except for his shock at the leaks.
Woods himself was contacted “by somebody in the Cabal, who identified himself that way.” He declined to talk about the jury’s choices, and assumed his fellow jurors would do the same. But E&P had the finalists listed in all 14 categories, including commentary. “The deliberations were honest and sincere and rigorous and respectful, at least in appearance,” says Woods. “If people then walked away from that table and willingly participated in betraying the confidence of the deliberation, it isn’t that they’ve just torn open a seam in the Pulitzer process, but they’ve individually betrayed the other jurors.”
The ‘rightness’ of their motives
Those who work to circulate the premature finalist list — and who argue that it’s an impossibility for 77 reporters to sit quietly on a secret like this for 30 days — feel equally strong about the rightness of their motives. Deborah Howell, for example, says some within the Cabal remain driven by the sense that they’re correcting an injustice from long-ago, when early word on the Pulitzer finalists appeared to them to be the private property of one Gray Lady alone.
“The New York Times always seemed to know who the finalists were, and no one else did,” she says, suggesting that the reason is the closeness of the paper’s Pulitzer-board ties for many of the 88 years that the Prizes have been awarded.
Soon, though, some in the Cabal developed another mission. “Finalists ought to get their time in the sunlight,” Howell says, and not just appear on Pulitzer Day to be the losers in the contest. Were the finalists to be announced shortly after the jurors met, “I think all this would end in about two days.”
Pulitzer administrator Gissler responds that “there are pros and cons to announcing the finalists first.” But “at this point we have opted for confidentiality about the finalists, because it helps to curtail lobbying, and minimizes confusion and undue anguish and heartache” among those who the Pulitzer board doesn’t select for a prize. “And many jurors comply with it,” he notes.
Jurors often don’t talk, Howell agrees. But it only takes one per panel, and the attraction of trading for news of the selections of other juror groups is obviously seductive. For reporters, of course, such information is pure gold. “Almost everybody wants to horse-trade for information,” says Howell, and especially “in the case where the jurors’ bosses may want to know” — that is, when their own newspapers may be a finalist.
Joe Strupp, a senior editor with E&P, says he has reported for the finalist-list story for all three years it has run. In the crush of Pulitzer Prize-related items E&P did every year, he says, learning in advance about the finalists “started by accident.” Now, though, it is a popular annual feature. “Jurors are sworn to secrecy, but they leak away,” he says. “It’s intriguing.”
What kinds of responses does he get when he asks journalists to comment on the rumors? “It’s a mixed bag,” according to Strupp. “Some will say, ‘I don’t want to comment.’ Others will say yes, we heard the same thing. But I’ve never heard anybody say, ‘No, that’s wrong.’ ” It all sometimes seems an inside joke in E&P, which displays a fondness for parentheses. “Pulitzer Finalists Leaked (Again): Is This the List?” read the March 9 headline, while the lead said: “Just hours after the Pulitzer Prize juries completed their annual choice … the annual leaking of purported finalist lists (naturally) began.” But Strupp says E&P doesn’t take the finalist leaks lightly. “We take it as an important aspect of the awards.”
Leaking the winners
In the week leading up to this coming today’s official Pulitzer announcements, E&P began preparing for yet another set of leaks — of the winners, after the Pulitzer board meets to decide the final awards. Last April, the magazine said, “E&P learned that some finalists knew they’d won hours or days before the world found out.” And the magazine asked, “Will it happen again?”
Few who know much about the Pulitzer process would doubt it. E&P ticked off a number of 2004 instances of early notification, without identifying exactly who told the winning reporters. Perhaps surprisingly — given the New York Times’ reputation for such leakage — that paper’s 2004 public service Pulitzer, for David Barstow and Lowell Bergman’s national probe of workplace hazards, wasn’t among the cases that E&P cited.
As Barstow tells it, the early signals that the Times was a finalist, and later was about to win a Pulitzer, were “like a radio frequency thing; the frequency seemed to get stronger as the time got nearer.” But no one told him directly, and certainly, he says, not William Safire, the former columnist who last year was the only Times staffer on the Pulitzer board.
The rumor mill and E&P correctly named Barstow and Bergman as finalists in investigative reporting. “When you’re a finalist,” Barstow says, “one thing you do is read who you’re up against.” And he felt somewhat discouraged, he says, comparing the Times‘ work with the Toledo Blade‘s series on Vietnam atrocities committed by Tiger Force — the eventual winner in the category.
When the newsroom radio waves suggested — the weekend before Pulitzer Monday — that the Bergman-Barstow entry had been shifted to public service by the board, it was too late to research the other competition. That was a good thing, Barstow says, because “if I’d read the Providence stuff (the Journal‘s coverage of the tragic Station Nightclub Fire), I’d have said there was no chance in hell. That work was fabulous.” (As it was, neither the Providence Journal nor two other public-service finalists last year won a 2004 prize. It was a disappointment that Joel Rawson, Journal executive editor, also learned about early, from a source who knew about the Times winning. Thus, he was able to brace his staff for the news.)
In 1998, when Barstow was with the St. Petersburg Times, he did get advance word after he heard that he was a part of two Pulitzer finalist entries, individually for explanatory reporting, and as part of an investigative-reporting team. An editor “took me out to lunch and said, ‘David, I feel certain you’re going to win a Pulitzer Prize some day, but it’s not going to be this year.’ ” While let down, he says, it allowed him to be more excited for his fellow staffer, Thomas French, who won for feature writing. (While Barstow won’t say which editor told him he wouldn’t win in 1998, he says it was not Andrew Barnes, then St. Petersburg Times editor, president and CEO, and a member of the Pulitzer board. Note: Barnes remains chairman of the Board of Trustees of The Poynter Institute, which owns the St. Petersburg Times.)
“It doesn’t shock me, confidentiality agreement or no, that this stuff leaks out,” says Barstow. “There are very tight relationships in journalism. And it’s really a compliment to the work itself, and the process, that people care so deeply” that they try to get the word out early.
Barstow himself served as a juror for Harvard University’s Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting this year. The six finalists were announced first, and even though no formal confidentiality pledge was signed, he prides himself on having kept the five-week secret — so that fellow Times reporter Diana Henriques was surprised at the announcement ceremony.
‘Part of the ritual’
It’s that model that Barstow believes makes more sense for the Pulitzers. Of course, the model almost exists in that form now, thanks to the leaks — and except, of course, for the element of jurors breaking their word. Still, says Barstow, “it’s actually become a kind of charming part of the ritual.” It’s the “nature of things for reporters to push the limits. And after all, these aren’t state secrets.”
Geneva Overholser, currently the Curtis B. Hurley Chair in Public Affairs Reporting at the University of Missouri, has developed strong feelings during a long association with the Pulitzers, including as chair of the Pulitzer board in 1998. “As a former board member and chair, and a several-time juror, my view is this: It is no longer workable, if it ever was, to keep the names private, and they ought to be released. As for advising folks on whether to talk, report, et cetera, that’s beyond my purview.”
As for Deborah Howell, she expects early March to be one of the Cabal’s busier times for the foreseeable future. Assembling the finalist list from interviews with jurors “is like putting a story together,” she says. It helps in her quest that she herself served as a Pulitzer juror in the ’80s and ’90s and had to deal with the emphasis on secrecy. Did she ever discuss the finalists with non-jurors? “You know, I don’t remember,” she says, although she adds, “If my boss had asked, I would have told him.” And for what it’s worth, says Howell, “I don’t expect to be a juror again any time soon.”
Roy Harris, senior editor of The Economist Group’s Boston-based CFO Magazine and a former Wall Street Journal reporter and editor, is writing a book on the public-service Pulitzer Prizes.