pulitzer prizechoosing winners of the

The fourteen prizes in the journalism category are meritorious public service, spot news reporting, beat reporting, national reporting, international reporting, investigative reporting, explanatory journalism, edito-rials, editorial cartoons, spot news photo, feature photo, commentary, criticism, and feature writing. The six arts and letters categories are fiction, drama, general nonfiction, history, biography, and poetry. One prize is awarded in the music category, for a “distinguished musical composition… which had its debut in the United States during the year.”

The meritorious public service prize is given to an outstanding newspaper; all other prizes go to indi-viduals who have distinguished themselves in their various fields during the year. Unlike Nobel Prizes in literature, which are awarded to writers on the basis of their whole body of work, Pulitzer Prizes only recognize specific works. John Steinbeck, for example, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1940, for his work, The Grapes of Wrath, while in 1962 he won a Nobel Prize in literature for his all of his achievements over the course of his lifetime.

Pulitzer Prizes are awarded every year for distinguished work within twenty-one categories of journalism, letters, drama, and music.

The prizes are administered by Columbia University, which relies on the Pulitzer Prize Board, an eighteen member body composed of publishing executives and academicians, to select the prize recipients. Because of the huge volume of submissions, the board depends on prize juries to screen the entries. Members of the juries—one jury for each prize category—sift through all the entries in their category until they can come up with their three finalists. Each jury submits its list of finalists to special three-member subcommittees of the board—again, one subcommittee for each of the prize categories.

The subcommittees then recommend winners to the full board, which passes the recommendations to the president of Columbia, who announces the winners. The board rarely rejects a recommendation from one of its subcommittees and the subcommittees rarely overturn the findings of the prize juries. Since 1975, when the trustees of Columbia University formally withdrew from the Pulitzer process, the president of the university has accepted every single one of the prize board’s recommendations for winners.

pulitzer prize

By Maggie Beckett

Ken Geiger and William Snyder of the Da l las Morn ing News rece ived the 1993 Pu l i t zer Pr i ze for Spot News Photography w i th th is photo o f the N ige r i an women ’s re l ay team w inn ing the bronze meda l in the Barce lona Olympics.

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The Pulitzer Prize competition is open to anyone willing to fill out an entry form and remit the $50 entry fee. In journalism, the vast majority of entries are submitted by newspapers, which relish the prestige that comes with a Pulitzer. There is no limit to the number of entries a single newspaper can submit; in fact, most large daily papers make multiple submissions: in 1990 New York Newsday led all comers with forty-one entries, followed by The Washington Post and the Associated Press, each with forty. The New York Times had thirty-five. A total of 1,770 entries were made that year. The same rules apply to the awards for books. Not surprisingly, entries are dominated

by large publishing houses. In 1990, 590 submissions were made in the book category alone: 181 for general nonfiction, 123 for poetry, 115 for fiction, 92 for biography, and 79 for history. The president of Columbia announces the Pulitzer Prize winners in early April; the actual judging begins long before that. For books, the process begins on December 31, the entry deadline. A copy of each entered book is sent by the Pulitzer Prize administrator, a Columbia University official, to each ember of the five different book juries. Each book category has its own three-member jury, composed of college professors and writers with expertise in the category they oversee. History professors, for example, serve on the

In 2010, there were a total of 2502 entries sent in to the Pulitzer Prize board at Columbia University for inclusion into the lengthy judging process. Only 21 were picked to be winners.

3%

5%

46%

29%

67%

6%

44%

1159 Book Entries

1103 Journalism Entries

Journalism Categories 14

161 Music Entries

Letters & Drama Categories 6

79 Play Entries

Music Category 1

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which they will then submit to the Pulitzer Prize board for final judgment. Juries must list all of their nominations in alphabetical order and cannot indicate any preference among the three finalists. A total of forty-two nominations within the fourteen journalism categories are made to the Pulitzer board. When deciding among the journalism finalists, the board does not divide into the normal subcommittees. Each final entry is read by all eighteen of the board members during journalism’s two-day judgment period in April. The winners are picked by a vote of the entire board. Since the board is composed of editors and publishers, many of whom work for newspapers that are involved in the competition, rules have been adopted to prevent any conflict of interest and keep the entire process fair. A board member must leave the room when an entry from his or her newspaper is being discussed. A board member is no longer allowed to vote in a category that includes an entry from his or her newspaper.

The Pulitzer Prizes have been called the Academy Awards of journalism, and just like the Academy Awards they too

have suffered for their fair share of controversy. Since 1917, when the prizes were first given f rom the trust fund that was established by newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer in his will, several dubious choices have been made. For an example, in 1941 Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls was rejected, saying it was both “offensive and lascivious.”

The board didn’t even award a fiction prize that year. More recently, in 1981, Janet Cooke from The Washington Post received the prize for feature writing for “Jimmy’s World,” a story about an eight -year -old heroin addict living in Washington, D.C., which included eyewitness accounts of “Jimmy” shooting up. It turned out that the reporter had completely made up the entire story, and the Washington Post had to give up the award.

Despite the Pulitzer Prize’s long history of controversial decisions, only two winners have ever refused their prizes: Sinclair Lewis, and William Saroyan. “All prizes, like all titles, are dangerous,” Lewis wrote, rejecting his Pulitzer. Even so, he had no problem accepting a Nobel Prize just a short four years later.

history book jury, and novelists serve on the fiction jury. Jurists for each category have until January to compare their notes, usually over the phone, and to come up with three finalists to submit to the Pulitzer board. That means a total of fifteen books, three for each of the five book categories, is nominated for judging by the Pulitzer board. Rather than having every board member read all fifteen finalists between January and April, the board breaks down into seven subcommittees of three members, with some members serving on more than one panel. There is one subcommittee for each of five book categories. Members of the subcommittees have until April to read the books and formulate their opinions. That way, by the time the whole board convenes at Columbia for the two days in early April when they judge the finalists, the subcommittees will be ready to announce their recommended winners in their respective bailiwicks.

The drama and music juries are each composed of three individuals who have expertise in the field that they are judging—theater critics for the drama category, composers or music critics in the music categories. They then submit three finalists each to the board March 1. The members of the drama subcommittee then have a month to see the plays performs, or, if that is not possible, read them; the music subcom-mittee can listen to a tape recording of the three nominated compositions to reach its decision. Final recommendations are made to the board as a whole when it assembles in April.

The journalism awards work slightly differently. Each of the thirteen journalism juries has five members rather than three. The thirteen juries (one jury goes over both of the photography categories) gather at Columbia for two days in early March to sift through all of the 1,770 or so entries in fourteen categories and come up with three finalists in each category. The sixty-five jurists, who are primarily working journalists, editors, publishers, and even former Pulitzer winners, are not paid anything for their labor. (Book jurists receive a $1,000 stipend.) At the end of the two-day period, each jury with nominate three finalists,

The president of Columbia University announces the winners of the Pulitzer Prize in early April, but the actual judging begins quite a long time before they can even think of handing out the prizes.

Since 1917, when the prizes were first given from a trust fund that was established by newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer’s will, many dubious choices have been made.

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