The press at its best
Pulitzer's Gold tells the stories behind the best public service journalism of the past 90 years.
One team of reporters digs through the political and personal rubble of a mining disaster. Another helps New Orleans pick up the pieces and asks, “What went wrong?” in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Yet another uncovers a scandalous cover-up by the Catholic Church.
All these stories came to fruition by the labors of curious and resourceful reporters and brought light to things that shouldn’t remain in shadows. They also all won the coveted Gold Medal Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, and they all now appear in Roy Harris’ Pulitzer’s Gold: Behind the Prize for Public Service Journalism (2007, University of Missouri Press).
Harris — a veteran of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Los Angeles Times and, for 23 years, the Wall Street Journal and currently a senior editor of CFO magazine — spoke with RJI about the book, the stories he discovered, and what he hopes citizens and journalists can take from his work.
RJI: What made you decide to write this book?
Roy Harris: It started as a smaller project when I was preparing a summary of the five public service Pulitzers that had been won in a 15-year period by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. St Louis is my hometown. It’s where I started in the newspaper business, and it’s where my father had worked for 43 years. He had been involved in four of those five prizes, between 1937 and 1952.
I found that there really hadn’t been anything written about the public service prizes as a genre, and it amazed me because it’s the top prize of the year. I was quite puzzled by that. I had done some research at Columbia University for the St. Louis prizes. The five of them were extremely eclectic: there was an anti-pollution story, a voter fraud scam, the investigation of a major Illinois press scandal, the exposing of payoffs withing the internal revenue system, and there was a mine disaster. It was stunning to me as I looked at them all how different the public service prize winners can be.
If you look at the whole 90 years of Pulitzer prizes, there’s this incredible history that’s captured in the span of prizes across the years. It occurred to me that I could accomplish several things by tackling this project. I could tell the story behind the story for journalists, in an All the President’s Men kind of way. But I also thought I might be able to capture U.S. history in a whole new way for the average citizen — for people who may not know just how much journalism has influenced society.
RJI: What else about the public service category piqued your interest?
Harris: The Public Service Prize is for a newspaper, not for individuals, and the work that went into these stories was often very complex, involving different areas of the newspaper: editorial page, news pages, teams of reporters, online journalists and in some cases even the legal department. In such cases the individual efforts tend to get lost. There wasn't nearly enough individual recognition, compared to the scope of the accomplishment.
Roy Harris
I also got the sense that these team-based prizes were often overshadowed in Pulitzer history by individual investigative efforts that won in other categories. I saw this amazing human drama in these stories, and it seemed a shame to lose that. There’s the drama of these reporters having their first “Aha” moments.
You think of All the President’s Men, but for every case like that, there are 10 other prize-winning cases on a smaller scale. It may not be the president that gets knocked out of office, but it may be the mayor or the police chief.
RJI: What kind of research and reporting did you do for the book?
Harris: The archives at Columbia, containing newspaper clippings and entry material, only told a small part of the story. When I was working in St. Louis, I had been able to find veteran journalists from early prize-winning teams. In fact, I found two reporters who had worked on a prize-winning story in 1936.
So for the 90-year span of research, I resolved to interview more journalists and identify individuals and what they contributed to the effort. With newer stories, it was both easier and harder. I had to talk to a lot of them, and they all had different accounts. I had to try to combine their accounts into one narrative.
Of course, while I was doing this, journalists continued to do excellent work. There was a little story brewing in my backyard about some priests in the Catholic Church doing unspeakable things to youngsters, and the church covering it up. This just ignited the whole thing for me. I was reading this as I was doing the research, and then when the Boston Globe won the Pulitzer Prize (2003) for its coverage, I knew that would be a centerpiece for the book.
RJI: Did you uncover any big surprises or favorite stories?
Harris: The ones that provided the biggest “Aha” moment tended to be the ones I liked the most.
Starting with the Post-Dispatch, reporting on the Centralia, Illinois, mine disaster (1948 prize) was a perfect example of a story that was covered so completely from the bottom up and top down that it allowed the reporters to discover things that the average newspaper never would find.
The paper had been following payoffs in the mines for a while. When this mine disaster happened, this team of reporters went to Centralia, where eventually 111 people turned out to have been killed. While they were reporting, they were kind of pulling at threads about this issue, learning that inspections had not been held and that mine conditions were abysmal.
One of the reporters found a letter in a portion of the mine he was able to get to, a letter signed by many miners and addressed to the governor of Illinois, saying, “Please save our lives” and talking about how unsafe the mine conditions were. At the time he found this, a number of the people who signed it were still trapped down in the mines, and bodies were being brought out — including those of some of the signers. It was such a dramatic validation of what the paper had been doing.
It’s not something you celebrate, because of the horror of it, but it tells you you’re on the right path.
RJI: What do you hope practicing journalists will take from book?
Harris: The first thing that hit me was how consistent the reporting techniques have been over the 90 years of the prizes, despite obvious changes in technology and society. The nature of finding the lie, finding the truth, trying to background a situation and explain what’s wrong hasn't changed.
A lot of the techniques have evolved over the years, of course, but they have the same basic drive: a curious reporter who will stop at nothing to get a good story. There’s a lot you can learn from your own history. Journalists can learn techniques from the past.
I think reporters can also simply be inspired by these stories. They can be reminded that at any day in the job of being a journalist, there’s the possibility that you will uncover the story of a lifetime and really be able to perform a huge public service.
RJI: What about citizens?
Harris: The average person is a definite target audience for this book, especially now, with the nature of America’s press changing, with pressure on newspapers to cut budgets and reduce staffs and maybe pare down the size of investigative teams.
I think Americans need to know what the press at its very best can do to improve the quality of life, to serve as a watchdog over malfeasance, and generally to represent the best angels of our nature out there in the world.
There is a true danger that if newspapers become too constrained, this function could dwindle to such a degree that we find we’ve lost one of the saving graces of American society: the vigilant, public-minded newspaper staff. Democracy in our country depends on a strong press, and where you see the greatest strength of the press is in public service journalism.