Times Wins 2 Pulitzers for Spot News, Photos

The Los Angeles Times won two Pulitzer Prizes and the New York Times won three Tuesday, but the most coveted Pulitzer of all--the gold medal for meritorious public service--was awarded to the small Grand Forks, N.D., Herald (circulation 37,000) for its coverage of the March 1997 floods and fire that destroyed more than 10% of the city’s homes and ravaged the newspaper’s own offices.

The Pulitzer Prize Board praised the Grand Forks paper for its “sustained and informative coverage, vividly illustrated with photographs, that helped hold its community together in the wake” of disaster.

The Los Angeles Times won its Pulitzers in the spot news category for “comprehensive coverage of a botched bank robbery and subsequent police shootout” in North Hollywood last spring and in the feature photography category, for Clarence Williams’ “powerful images documenting the plight of young children with parents addicted to alcohol and drugs.” The photographs--22 in all--were published last fall, illustrating the paper’s two-day series of stories on “Orphans of Addiction” written by reporter Sonia Nazario.

Most Pulitzers are given to individuals, but the prize for the shootout coverage was given to The Times’ staff, 30 of whom worked on various aspects of the story on the first day alone; this was the third Pulitzer in six years awarded to the entire local reporting staff of The Times for coverage of a Southern California tragedy. The staff also won Pulitzers in 1993 for coverage of the riots in South Central Los Angeles and in 1995 for the Northridge earthquake.

This was the fourth time since 1969 that The Times has won two Pulitzers in a single year. The paper has now won 22 since its first in 1942.

The New York Times, which has won 77 Pulitzers--more by far than any other news organization--won three Tuesday for the fourth time since 1978. The three went to: Linda Greenhouse, in beat reporting, for her “consistently illuminating coverage of the United States Supreme Court;” to Michiko Kakutani, in criticism, for her “passionate, intelligent writing on books and contemporary literature,” and to the New York Times staff for its “revealing series that profiled the corrosive effects of drug corruption in Mexico.”

The reporters who worked the New York Times series were Sam Dillon and Julia Preston, a husband-wife team in the paper’s Mexico City bureau, Tim Golden and Craig Pyes. They spent more than a year reporting the stories, during which time they were sued and threatened with death.

N.D. Paper’s Award Maintains Tradition

The Pulitzers, the most prestigious prizes in journalism, have been awarded annually since 1917 by Columbia University, and the announcement Tuesday that the Grand Forks Herald had won the public service award is in keeping with the Pulitzer Prize Board’s long tradition of honoring smaller newspapers for overcoming tremendous obstacles.

The Herald’s presses were already under water from floods triggered by melting snow and ice left by winter blizzards when electrical fires broke out last April 19, gutting the newsroom and circulation department of the paper and forcing the staff to relocate. The next day’s paper was written and edited in makeshift offices at the University of North Dakota, and when floods hit the university the following day, the staff relocated again, to an elementary school 12 miles away, in Manvel, N.D.

The paper’s newsroom staff of 57--most of whom were flood victims themselves--worked out of the school library, and the paper was actually printed at the plant of the Herald’s fellow Knight-Ridder newspaper, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, 300 miles away.

“The Pulitzer is a journalism award, but this award is for the entire paper,” Mike Jacobs, editor of the Herald, said Tuesday afternoon. “Without the circulation department in particular--not to mention all the loaners we got from other Knight-Ridder papers--we could never have gotten this newspaper out.”

Pending reconstruction of its downtown offices, the Herald now operates out of temporary quarters in a building that once housed a discount department store. When word of the paper’s victory flashed across newsroom computer screens Tuesday, Managing Editor Kevin Grinde said members of the paper’s business staff began “showering reporters and editors with confetti. Two hours of hooting, celebrating and drinking nonalcoholic champagne” ensued, leaving Grinde and many others “sticky and stinky,” as he put it.

By nightfall, the staff and many well-wishers had gathered for pizza and serious libations at the Hub Bar, across the street from the old newspaper office. The bar, the staff’s longtime favorite, reopened just a month ago after it, too, had been severely damaged by the floods.

Champagne Flows at Winners’ Offices

Champagne of the alcoholic variety was poured during the work day for many Pulitzer winners Tuesday, including those at Los Angeles Times, where a brief celebration began at 3 o’clock, three hours after the announcement, in an upstairs auditorium.

But the celebrating in most offices actually began as soon as the first awards were announced.

At The Times, for example, applause broke out first when the award for coverage of the bank shootout was announced.

That story documented an event that was “beyond the pale, so outrageous in terms of urban violence that we threw every resource we had into covering it,” said John Arthur, now the paper’s managing editor for regional editions and then the editor of the San Fernando Valley edition, whose staff did most of the major work on the story.

The story unfolded on live television and gripped the entire city. “The frightening image of two people in body armor on the streets of suburbia on a sunny day created absolute terror in the neighborhood,” said Ardith Hilliard, then managing editor and now editor of the Valley edition. “People were trapped in their homes. Parents couldn’t get to their kids in school. We had to use everything we had to make sense of it all.”

Williams, The Times’ other Pulitzer winner this year, is 31 and has been a full-time staff photographer for only two years. He and Nazario spent several months with the families of drug addicts, determined to document the plight of their children in hopes of “calling attention to the cycles of sickness and pain and neglect” they were subjected to.

Project Called Team Effort

The work of Williams and Nazario was also entered in the public service category, where they were finalists. Williams paid tribute to Nazario on Tuesday, saying, “She played such an important role that it wouldn’t have been possible without her.” He described the project as “a real team effort” involving Nazario, other photographers, and senior metro projects editor Joel Sappell, who supervised the series.

Williams said the first person he called after learning he had won was his father, a third-grade teacher in Camden, N.J.

“He said ‘Hallelujah, Hallelujah!’ ” Williams said. Williams wanted to tell his mother, too, but she works nights, and he didn’t want to wake her.

In addition to the two winning entries and the entry of Williams and Nazario in the public service category, The Times had two other finalists--cartoonist Paul Conrad and Atlanta bureau chief J. R. Moehringer, who was nominated in feature writing for “an extraordinary [Los Angeles Times magazine] documentation of a heavyweight boxer’s glory days and his fall.”

Moehringer wrote the story while on the staff of the paper’s Orange County Edition.

The Grand Forks Herald was not the only small newspaper honored in Tuesday’s Pulitzer announcement.

Bernard L. Stein, editor and publisher of the Riverdale Press, a New York City weekly newspaper with a circulation of 11,800, was honored for “gracefully written editorials on politics” and other local issues. Stein, a Pulitzer finalist twice before, said his prize honored excellent journalists working for small community newspapers throughout the country.

As usual, however, most of the Pulitzers went to big-city dailies--not just the New York Times and Los Angeles Times but to the Los Angeles Times sister Times Mirror paper, the Baltimore Sun (Gary Cohn and Will Englund, in investigative reporting, for their “compelling series on the international shipbreaking industry that revealed the dangers posed to workers and the environment when discarded [Navy] ships are dismantled”); to the Chicago Tribune (Paul Salopek, in explanatory reporting, for his “enlightening profile of the Human Genome Diversity Project, which seeks to chart the genetic relationship among all people,”); to the New York Daily News (columnist Mike McAlary, in commentary, for his “coverage of the brutalization of Haitian immigrant by police officers at a Brooklyn station house”), and to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Martha Rial, in spot news photography, for her “life-affirming portraits of survivors of the conflicts in Rwanda and Burundi”).

The remaining Pulitzers in journalism were awarded to Russell Carollo and Jeff Nesmith of the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News, in national reporting, for disclosing “dangerous flaws and mismanagement in the military health care system,” stories that prompted reforms in the system; to Thomas French of the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, in feature writing, for his massive, seven-part series, a “detailed and compassionate narrative portrait of a mother and two daughters slain on a Florida vacation, and the three-year investigation into their murders”), and to Stephen P. Breen of the Asbury Park (N.J.) Press, in cartooning.

Breen’s selection triggered the only immediate controversy in this year’s awards.

In each Pulitzer category, a jury of five journalists picks three finalists from among more than 100 entries and forwards them to the Pulitzer Prize Board in alphabetical order for a final choice. The board has the prerogative to move finalists from one category to another--as it did this year in shifting Greenhouse from explanatory reporting to beat reporting and in shifting McAlary from spot news reporting to commentary. The board can also reject all three finalists and give the award to someone else altogether, as it has often done in the past and did again this year in cartooning.

The board is “all powerful in every sense,” said Seymour Topping, administrator for the Pulitzers. “It is an independent board.”

Three Cartoon Finalists Rejected

The cartooning jury’s three finalists this year were Paul Conrad of the Los Angeles Times, Jeff MacNelly of the Chicago Tribune and Joel Pett of the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader. When the board decided to reject all three, the chairman of the cartooning jury was asked to submit the names of the next three finishers in the jury’s balloting. They included Breen, a 27-year-old native of Los Angeles.

Although no one on the board will speak on the record about their reasons for the shift, Mike Keefe, editorial cartoonist for the Denver Post and a member of the cartooning jury, said he thinks the Board was reluctant to give a fourth Pulitzer to three-time winners Conrad or MacNelly and “couldn’t bring themselves to give one to Pett . . . a very unorthodox cartoonist who’s got a primitive style of drawing that strikes some people as being nonartistic.”

Keefe conceded that he was only “speculating,” but some board members have historically preferred to honor people who have not won before, especially when they are in competition with winners of multiple Pulitzers.

Keefe said he plans to write a letter of protest and make suggestions on avoiding this problem in the future.

Breen is a “rising star who someday may deserve” a Pulitzer, and “I don’t in any way want to demean his work,” Keefe said, “but he certainly didn’t deserve one this year.

Each Pulitzer Prize carries with it a $5,000 award, except for the prize in public service, which carries a gold medal. All the prizes will be presented May 28 during a luncheon at Columbia University.

* PULITZER FOR ROTH: Novelist Philip Roth won in his fourth time as a finalist. A14