New Orleans, Seattle Papers Each Win 2 Pulitzer Prizes

The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which had never before won a Pulitzer Prize, won two on Monday, including the most prestigious, the gold medal for public service, for a series of articles examining threats to the world’s supply of fish. Walt Handelsman of the Times-Picayune won a Pulitzer for editorial cartooning.

The Seattle Times also won two Pulitzers. One was in beat reporting, for Byron Acohido’s exhaustive analysis of rudder control problems on the Boeing 737, the most widely flown commercial jet now in use; the other was in investigative reporting, for the work of Eric Nalder, Deborah Nelson and Alex Tizon in uncovering widespread corruption and inequities in federally sponsored housing programs for Native Americans.

Both Seattle Times entries triggered major governmental reforms, an outcome that is valued highly by the Pulitzer Prize Board, which makes the awards under the aegis of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York.

Pulitzers were also awarded Monday in seven arts and letters categories, and in one of them--music--trumpeter Wynton Marsalis became the first jazz artist ever to win a Pulitzer (although at least two Pulitzers previously have eebeen awarded for works that included some jazz).

Jazz is a truly American art form, though, and the board has now recognized that, not only with the award to Marsalis but by changing the very definition of the award, effective with the 1998 competition. Gone from the new definition is the requirement that the work be “in any of the larger forms including chamber, orchestral, choral, opera, song, dance or other forms of musical theater.” Now entries must simply be “distinguished musical composition of significant dimension.”

Marsalis, 35, an eight-time Grammy winner--and the only person ever to win Grammys for both jazz and classical recordings--was honored by the Pulitzer board for “Blood on the Fields,” an epic three-hour oratorio that attempts to tell the story of blacks in America through song and poetry.

“It’s for me and for the cats in the band, because we all work on this stuff together,” Marsalis said Monday. “When we were putting some of the music together, I had to keep saying, ‘This is not noise, man. It sounds like noise, but it’s not.’ ”

Other arts and letters winners were:

* Steven Millhauser, in fiction, for “Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer” (Crown).

* Richard Kluger, in general nonfiction, for “Ashes to Ashes: America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris” (Alfred A. Knopf).

* Jack Rakove, in history, for “Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution” (Alfred A. Knopf).

* Frank McCourt, in biography, for “Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir” (Scribner). McCourt, who also won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for this account of his impoverished Irish childhood, said Monday, “My mother wouldn’t have liked this book. It was too revealing. She was ashamed of our past.”

* Lisel Mueller, in poetry, for “Alive Together: New and Selected Poems” (Louisiana State University Press).

For the 14th time since the Pulitzers began in 1917, the board deemed no America play worthy of a Pulitzer and so gave no award in the drama category.

In each Pulitzer category, hundreds of initial entries are winnowed down to three finalists by nominating juries, and this year the jury in drama nominated “Pride’s Crossing” by Tina Howe, “Collected Stories” by Donald Margulies and “The Last Night of Ballyhoo” by Alfred Uhry, who won a Pulitzer in 1988 for “Driving Miss Daisy.”

Although no board member or juror would confirm it, Uhry was thought to have been the jury’s first choice, the favorite of three of the five members.

Pulitzer board deliberations are confidential, and members are reluctant to discuss their reasons for giving or withholding specific awards. But as Jeremy Gerard, chairman of the drama jury, said Monday, “It’s their right [to reject all the jury nominations].”

Laurie Winer, drama critic for the Los Angeles Times and a member of the drama jury, said all three plays “deserved their nominations,” but she conceded, “Everyone knew this wasn’t a year teeming with great new American plays.”

Although winning more than one journalism Pulitzer in a year is not uncommon for the nation’s largest, most elite newspapers, officials at the Pulitzer office said they could not recall any newspaper as small as the Seattle Times (daily circulation: 235,000) winning two in the same year. The New Orleans paper is slightly larger, with about 260,000 daily. (The Sacramento Bee, circulation 280,000, won two Pulitzers in 1992.)

Michael Fancher, executive editor of the paper, said he was especially pleased by the award to Acohido for his two years of work on the problems of the Boeing 737 because Boeing launched “the most aggressive campaign” to discredit Acohido and to get him removed from the aerospace beat that he has covered for nine years.

Acohido’s five-part series on the Boeing 737 looked not only at that airplane--which has been involved in several unexplained fatal crashes--but at potential conflicts of interest between airplane manufacturers and the government officials who are supposed to regulate them.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune series that won the public service Pulitzer was “the brainchild of one writer,” Mark Schleifstein, Editor Jim Amoss said Monday after bringing an eight-piece brass band into the paper’s newsroom to lead the celebration.

“Mark felt the fisheries of the Gulf of Mexico had been neglected for too long,” Amoss said.

When he began to investigate, Schleifstein and colleagues John McQuaid and Bob Marshall found that the problem was not just in the Gulf. They wound up traveling to New England, Alaska, Thailand and Japan in pursuit of their story.

Their eight-part series concluded:

“Besieged by expoding demand, beset by overfishing, devastated by destruction of life-giving coastal wetlands, the world’s oceans have reached their limits,” and the “fishing way of life” was severely threatened.

Other Pulitzer winners this year included two newspapers owned by the Times Mirror Co., parent of the Los Angeles Times:

* The staff of Newsday on Long Island, N.Y., won the award in local spot news reporting for its “enterprising coverage” of the crash of TWA Flight 800 and its aftermath. It was Newsday’s eighth Pulitzer in the last five years.

* Lisa Pollak of the Baltimore Sun won the feature writing prize for her “compelling portrait of a baseball umpire who endured the death of a son while knowing that another son suffers from the same deadly genetic disease.” The umpire is John Hirschbeck, who gained worldwide attention last year when Roberto Alomar of the Baltmore Orioles spat on him.

The Sun also had two other finalists, Jim Haner in investigative reporting and Gregory Kane and Gilbert Lewthwaite in explanatory journalism.

Other Pulitzers were awarded to:

* Michael Vitez, Ron Cortes and April Saul of the Philadelphia Inquirer, in explanatory journalism, for a series on the choices that confronted seriously ill patients who sought to die with dignity.

* The staff of the Wall Street Journal, in national reporting, for its coverage of the human, scientific and financial struggle against AIDS and of new treatments for the disease.

* John F. Burns of the New York Times, in international reporting, for “courageous and insightful coverage of the harrowing regime imposed on Afghanistan by the Taliban.” It was Burns’ second Pulitzer in four years.

* Eileen McNamara of the Boston Globe, in commentary, for her columns on Massachusetts people and issues.

* Tim Page of the Washington Post, in criticism, for his “lucid and illuminating music criticism.”

* Michael Gartner of the Daily Tribune in Ames, Iowa, in editorial writing for his “common sense editorials about issues deeply affecting the lives of people in his community.” (Gartner is a former chairman of the Pulitzer Board and a former president of NBC News; his paper, of which he is both chairman and editor, has a daily circulation of 9,139 and is precisely the kind of small, independent paper the Pulitzer Board delights in honoring.)

* Annie Wells of the Press Democrat in Santa Rosa, Calif., in spot news photography, for her photo of a firefighter rescuing a teenager from raging floodwaters.

* Alexander Zemlianichenko of the Associated Press, in feature photography, for his photo of Russian President Boris Yeltsin dancing at a rock concert during his reelection campaign.

Each Pulitzer except the public service prize carries with it a $5,000 award and a certificate. The public service award, which goes to the paper, not an individual, is a gold medal. All Pulitzer Prizes will be awared at a luncheon May 29 at Columbia University.

Although the Los Angeles Times won no Pulitzers this year, it did have two finalists. One was the paper itself, in public service, for a seven-day examination of the way homicides are investigated and prosecuted in Los Angeles County. The lead reporters on the series were Fredric Tulsky and Ted Rohrlich, who were assisted by Richard O’Reilly, director of computer analysis for The Times. Patrick Downs was the photographer, and Tim Reiterman the project coordinator. The Times’ other finalist was in national reporting for Ronald Brownstein’s coverage of the 1996 presidential election.

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1997 Pulitzer Prizes Winners

JOURNALISM

* Public service: The Times-Picayune, New Orleans

* Spot news reporting: Staff of Newsday, Long Island, N.Y.

* Investigative reporting: Eric Nalder, Deborah Nelson and Alex Tizon of the Seattle Times

* Explanatory journalism: Michael Vitez, Ron Cortes and April Saul of the Philadelphia Inquirer

* Beat reporting: Byron Acohido of the Seattle Times

* National reporting: Staff of the Wall Street Journal

* International reporting: John F. Burns of the New York Times

* Feature writing: Lisa Pollak of the Baltimore Sun

* Commentary: Eileen McNamara of the Boston Globe

* Criticism: Tim Page of the Washington Post

* Editorial writing: Michael Gartner of The Daily Tribune, Ames, Iowa

* Editorial cartooning: Walt Handelsman of the Times-Picayune, New Orleans

* Spot news photography: Annie Wells of The Press Democrat, Santa Rosa, Calif.

* Feature photography: Alexander Zemlianichenko of The Associated Press

****

ARTS

* Fiction: “Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer,” by Steven Millhauser

* Drama: No award

* History: “Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution,” by Jack N. Rakove

* Biography: “Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir,” by Frank McCourt

* Poetry: “Alive Together: New and Selected Poems,” by Lisel Mueller

* General nonfiction: “Ashes to Ashes: America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris,” by Richard Kluger

* Music: “Blood on the Fields,” by Wynton Marsalis

Source: Associated Press