Raleigh, N.C., Paper Wins Pulitzer for Public Service

The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., won the Pulitzer Prize gold medal for meritorious public service Tuesday for articles exposing the health and environmental risks of waste disposal in hog farming.

The New York Times won three Pulitzers, the third time it has done so since the awards were established at Columbia University in New York in 1917. The New York newspaper has won 73 Pulitzers in that time, far more than any other newspaper.

The Orange County Register was awarded a Pulitzer in the investigative reporting category for its stories disclosing fraudulent and unethical practices in the fertility clinic at UC Irvine.

Register reporter Susan Kelleher got the original tip on the fertility clinic while looking into other problems at UC Irvine.

“A source told me, in lowered voice at the end of one conversation, that eggs had been stolen from a woman patient at the clinic,” Kelleher said Tuesday.

Kelleher began investigating, and as the number of alleged egg thefts grew, even her own editor could not believe it, she said.

The Register’s first story last May reported that an Orange County woman’s eggs had been stolen and transferred, as an embryo, to another woman, who gave birth nine months later and did not know that the eggs had been stolen until Register reporters told her.

A team of five Register reporters and four editors ultimately produced more than 200 stories documenting the theft of eggs from more than 70 women.

Tonnie Katz, editor and vice president of the Register, said that the story was especially difficult because, in keeping with its general policy, the paper insisted that all sources quoted in the story had to be identified by name.

Frank Daniels III, executive editor of the News & Observer at the time of his paper’s “Boss Hog” series, said that the stories began not with a tip but with a smell--”the horrible smell of all that hog waste washed into the lagoons of eastern North Carolina from the hog barns.”

Reporters Pat Stith and Joby Warrick and the paper’s project editor, Melanie Sill, worked eight months on the series about what Daniels called “an environmental disaster waiting to happen--and it did happen.”

Last year, the hog waste leaked into ground water and creeks, and at one point, heavy rains dumped 40 million gallons of feces and sludge into a fragile waterway, killing fish and driving off fishermen.

One of the paper’s reporters took special delight in winning the Pulitzer. Stith grew up on his family’s farm, where his chores included slopping the hogs.

The Pulitzer Prizes, the most prestigious awards in journalism, are awarded annually in 14 journalism categories and seven arts categories. Individual juries nominate three finalists in each category, and the Pulitzer Prize Board of 19 people--most of them present or former high-ranking journalists--make the final decisions.

The public service award carries with it a gold medal. The other awards confer $3,000 on each winner.

Among the arts winners this year was Jack Miles, former editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review and now director of the humanities center at Claremont Graduate School. Miles won the prize in biography for his audacious and critically acclaimed book “God: A Biography.”

Miles said that it took “literary daring” for the Pulitzer Prize Board to “recognize the legitimacy of a biography of God.”

“You can’t play by the conventional biographical rules on such a book,” he said.

Other arts winners Tuesday included:

* Richard Ford, in fiction, for “Independence Day” (Knopf).

* Jorie Graham, in poetry, for “The Dream of the Unified Field” (The Ecco Press).

* Tina Rosenberg, in general nonfiction, for “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism (Random House).

* Jonathan Larson, in drama, for “Rent.”

* Alan Taylor, in history, for “William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (Knopf).

* George Walker, in music, for “Lilacs” for voice and orchestra.

Walker is the first African American composer to win this award since it was instituted in 1943.

Larson won his Pulitzer less than three months after he was found dead in his Greenwich Village apartment, the victim of an aortic aneurysm. He was 35 and he is believed to be the first playwright to win a Pulitzer posthumously.

His off-Broadway play, a contemporary adaptation of Puccini’s classic “La Boheme,” is set in the East Village. The play finished its final dress rehearsal the night Larson died. It is scheduled to open on Broadway--sort of--April 29 in the Nederlander Theater, a seldom-used venue on the outskirts of the main theater district.

Taylor said he “came back to my office sweaty and frustrated from being beaten badly in tennis, and all my colleagues were there to congratulate me. It certainly swept all that frustration away in an instant.”

The three New York Times winners Tuesday were Robert D. McFadden, in spot news reporting, for what the Pulitzer Prize Board called “his highly skilled writing and reporting on deadline during the year;” Robert B. Semple Jr., in editorial writing, for his editorials on environmental issues, and Rick Bragg, in feature writing, for “his elegantly written stories” from across the South.

Bragg said that he was in Washington on assignment Monday when Joseph Lelyveld, the executive editor of the newspaper, called and asked if he could be in New York on Tuesday.

“I knew I was a Pulitzer finalist so I figured I’d either won or he was going to fire me,” Bragg said.

Newsday, the suburban Long Island newspaper owned by Times-Mirror Co., the parent company of the Los Angeles Times, was the only other paper to win more than one Pulitzer this year.

Newsday won two--Laurie Garrett, in explanatory journalism, for “her courageous reporting from Zaire on the Ebola virus outbreak there,” and Bob Keeler, in beat reporting, for “his detailed portrait of a progressive local Catholic parish and its parishioners.”

Garrett was nominated as a finalist in the international reporting category but the Pulitzer board shifted her to explanatory journalism after deciding that none of the three finalists nominated by the jury in explanatory journalism was worthy of a prize.

The board initially asked N. Christian Anderson, chairman of that jury and publisher of the Gazette Telegraph of Colorado Springs, Colo., to submit more entries. He submitted three more but the board finally decided to give the prize to Garrett.

The prize in international reporting then went to David Rohde of the Christian Science Monitor for “his persistent on-site reporting of the massacre of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica.”

Other winners in the journalism categories:

* Alix M. Freedman of the Wall Street Journal, in national reporting, for “her coverage of the tobacco industry, including a report that exposed how ammonia additives heighten nicotine potency.”

* E.R. Shipp of the New York Daily News, in commentary, for “her penetrating columns on race, welfare and other social issues.”

* Robert Campbell of the Boston Globe, in criticism, for “his knowledgeable writing on architecture.”

* Jim Morin of the Miami Herald, in editorial cartooning.

* Stephanie Welsh, a free-lancer, in feature photography, for “her shocking sequence of photos, published by the Newhouse News Service, of a female circumcision rite in Kenya.”

* Charles Porter IV, also a freelancer, for “his haunting photographs, taken after the Oklahoma City bombing . . . showing a one-year-old victim handed to and then cradled by a local fireman.”

Porter said that he was “honored to win,” but he added: “This is not necessarily the time for parties and celebrations. . . . I’m torn because . . . I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that this picture represents anyone and everyone who was involved in this tragedy.”

Herb Caen, whose column in the San Francisco Chronicle has become a local institution over the past 57 years, was given a special Pulitzer citation for what the Pulitzer Prize Board called “his extraordinary and continuing contribution as a voice and a conscience of his city.”

Caen said that when he was notified of the prize, he first thought it was a belated April Fools’ joke. “I’m a little dizzy,” he said.

The Los Angeles Times, which had previously won 19 Pulitzer Prizes, did not win this year but had finalists in three categories:

* In feature writing: Richard E. Meyer, for “his chilling [Los Angeles Times magazine] profile of a woman’s desperate attempts to communicate after being left mute and paralyzed by strokes.”

* In spot news reporting: the staff of The Times, for its coverage of the impact of the Walt Disney Co.’s purchase of Capital Cities/ABC Inc.

* In explanatory journalism: Michael A. Hiltzik, David R. Olmos and Barbara Marsh, for “reporting on problems stemming from the lack of regulation in California’s booming managed health care industry and the implications for the rest of the country.”

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Pulitzer Winners, Finalists

Pulitzer juries make up to three recommendations in each category without listing them in order of preference. The Pulitzer board, which awards the prizes, is not limited to these recommendations in choosing a winner.

JOURNALISM

Public service: The News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C. (winner), for work of Melanie Sill, Pat Stith and Joby Warrick on health risks of waste disposal in hog industry; the Star Tribune, Minneapolis-St. Paul, for stories about favors from legal publishers to members of federal judiciary; the Baltimore Sun, for work of Ginger Thompson and Gary Cohn on torture and murder by Honduran army with CIA knowledge.

Spot news reporting: Robert D. McFadden of the New York Times (winner), for skilled deadline writing; the Eagle-Tribune, Lawrence, Mass., for coverage of fire that destroyed city’s largest employer; Los Angeles Times staff, for impact of Disney Co. purchase of Capital Cities-ABC.

Investigative reporting: the Orange County (Calif.) Register staff (winner), for reporting on fraudulent and unethical practices at a research university hospital; Chris Adams of the Times-Picayune, New Orleans, for stories on Medicaid abuse; David Jackson and William Gaines of the Chicago Tribune, for probing Nation of Islam business dealings.

Explanatory journalism: Laurie Garrett of Newsday (winner), for reporting from Zaire on Ebola virus outbreak; Chris Lester and Jeffrey Spivak of the Kansas City (Mo.) Star, for series on suburban growth; Michael A. Hiltzik, David R. Olmos and Barbara Marsh of the Los Angeles Times, for reporting on problems from lack of regulation in managed health care in California; Adam Bryant, Stephen Engelberg and Matthew L. Wald of the New York Times, for stories on deficient safety regulation of commuter air traffic.

Beat reporting: Bob Keeler of Newsday (winner), for coverage of progressive local Catholic parish; Alison Grant of the Plain Dealer, Cleveland, for stories on corrupt dealings between contractors and city officials in Beachwood; Fred Schulte and Jenni Bergal of the Sun-Sentinel, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., for abuses in Medicaid health maintenance organizations.

National reporting: Alix M. Freedman of the Wall Street Journal (winner), for tobacco industry coverage; Russell Carollo, Carol Hernandez and Jeff Nesmith of the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News for stories on lenient handling of sexual misconduct cases by the military; David Maraniss and Michael Weiskopf of the Washington Post, for reporting on Republican takeover in House of Representatives.

International reporting: David Rohde of the Christian Science Monitor (winner), for stories on massacre of Bosnian Muslims in Srebranica; Laurie Garrett of Newsday, for Ebola virus outbreak (winner for explanatory journalism); the Wall Street Journal staff, for stories on collapse of Mexican peso.

Feature writing: Rick Bragg of the New York Times (winner), for stories about contemporary America; Richard E. Meyer of the Los Angeles Times, for profile of stroke victim’s desperate effort to communicate; Hank Stuever of the Albuquerque Tribune, for account of his return to Oklahoma City after bombing.

Commentary: E. R. Shipp of the New York Daily News (winner), for columns on race, welfare and other social issues; Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle for columns about the city (winner of special award); Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal, for columns about alleged child abuse.

Criticism: Robert Campbell of the Boston Globe (winner), for writing about architecture; Gail Caldwell of the Boston Globe, for book reviews and comments; Stephen Hunter of the Baltimore Sun, for film criticism.

Editorial writing: Robert B. Semple Jr. of the New York Times (winner), for editorials on environmental issues; Daniel P. Henninger of the Wall Street Journal, for various topics; N. Don Wycliff of the Chicago Tribune, for welfare reform.

Editorial cartooning: Jim Morin of the Miami Herald (winner); Jim Borgman of the Cincinnati Enquirer; Ted Rall of Chronicle Features, San Francisco; Tom Toles of the Buffalo (N.Y.) News.

Spot news photography: Charles Porter IV, free-lancer, distributed by Associated Press (winner), for pictures of 1-year-old bomb victim in Oklahoma City; Associated Press staff, for Chechnya portfolio; Jerome Delay of Associated Press, for coverage of Middle East and Bosnia.

Feature photography: Stephanie Welsh, free-lancer, distributed by Newhouse News Service (winner), for female circumcision in Kenya; Stan Grossfeld of the Boston Globe, for photos of teenagers transformed by the birth of their child; David C. Turnley of the Detroit Free Press, for portraits from Bosnia.

ARTS

Fiction: “Independence Day,” by Richard Ford (winner); “Mr. Ives’ Christmas,” by Oscar Hijuelos; “Sabbath’s Theater,” by Philip Roth.

Drama: “Rent,” by Jonathan Larson; “A Fair Country,” by Jon Robin Baitz; “Old Wicked Songs,” by Jon Marans.

History: “William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic,” by Alan Taylor (winner); “The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic,” by Lance Banning; “Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb,” by Richard Rhodes.

Biography: “God: A Biography,” by Jack Miles (winner); “John Sloan: Painter and Rebel,” by John Loughery; “Mozart: A Life,” by Maynard Solomon.

Poetry: “The Dream of the Unified Field,” by Jorie Graham (winner); “New and Selected Poems,” by Donald Justice; “Chickamauga,” by Charles Wright.

General nonfiction: “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism,” by Tina Rosenberg (winner); “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life,” by Daniel C. Dennett; “Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder,” by Lawrence Weschler.

Music: “Lilacs,” by George Walker (winner); “Adagio Tenebroso,” by Elliott Carter; “Variations for Violin and Piano,” by Peter Lieberson.