Sept. 11 Dominates Pulitzers as N.Y. Times Wins Record 7

With coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath dominating the awards, the New York Times won a record seven Pulitzer Prizes on Monday. The Los Angeles Times and Washington Post received two each.

Eight of the 14 Pulitzers announced by the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York were given for stories and photos related to the attacks and the resulting war on terrorism.

The New York Times won six of those, including the most coveted of the Pulitzers, the gold medal for public service. That prize was awarded for the newspaper’s special stand-alone section, “A Nation Challenged,” published daily for almost four months after Sept. 11. It included more than 1,800 “Portraits of Grief,” brief character sketches of people killed that day.

Barry Siegel of the Los Angeles Times won the prize for feature writing for what the board called a “humane and haunting portrait”--a soul-searching journey with a popular and highly respected Utah judge who agonized over what he could have done to prevent both his father’s suicide and, 20 years later, the suicide of Paul Wayment. The judge had sentenced Wayment to 30 days in prison for negligence in the death of his 2-year-old son.

Alex Raksin and Bob Sipchen of The Los Angeles Times won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing for “comprehensive and powerfully written” pieces that prompted both the city of Los Angeles and the state of California to take a more active role in the treatment and protection of chronically mentally ill “street people.”

This year’s prizes raise the Los Angeles Times’ total to 27.

The New York Times, which has now won 88 Pulitzers, more than any other news organization, also won for international reporting, beat reporting, explanatory journalism, feature photography, news photography and commentary.

The previous record for Pulitzers in one year was three--a mark achieved four times by the New York Times, twice by the Washington Post and once each by the Philadelphia Inquirer and Boston Globe.

Each Pulitzer, except for the public service award, carries with it a $7,500 cash prize.

Among the seven Pulitzers won by the New York Times, the commentary prize was especially notable because it was the third Pulitzer for columnist Thomas L. Friedman, 48, who previously won in 1983 and 1988 for international reporting.

Friedman, honored this time for “his clarity of vision, based on extensive reporting, in commenting on the worldwide impact of the terrorist threat,” said this Pulitzer was particularly satisfying because “this is the biggest story of my lifetime, and if we in the media don’t get it right, don’t explain it right, it won’t be good for the future of our kids and the future of our country.”

The only other three-time individual winners since the Pulitzers began in 1917 are four cartoonists and correspondent/columnist Arthur Krock of the New York Times.

Newspapers traditionally celebrate their Pulitzers with champagne in the newsroom, and at the Los Angeles Times champagne ceremony following Monday’s announcement, John Carroll, The Times’ editor, praised Siegel as someone who has “practiced his craft with skill and devotion for many years.” Carroll also drew applause and laughter when he praised “a supporting cast about the size of a Cecil B. DeMille production” for having helped with the editing and production of Siegel’s 6,000-word article.

Carroll named 14 editors, designers and photographers, and he and Siegel especially singled out Richard E. Meyer, Siegel’s editor and a two-time Pulitzer finalist himself.

Siegel, 52, a Times reporter since 1976, said he was “greatly indebted” to Meyer, not only for his editing but for his “passion and sense of narrative.”

Siegel said his story was about “moral choices and their consequences” and said he was particularly fortunate that Judge Robert Hilder in Silver Summit, Utah, “a remarkable man . . . opened up to me and made this story a writer’s dream.”

Carroll said The Times’ prize-winning editorials were noteworthy because “they were not ivory tower productions. Alex and Bob went to the worst parts of the city . . . and combined sheer reporting with clarity of thought to produce them.

Raksin, 41, and Sipchen, 48, both with The Times since the mid-1980s, visited the alleys and freeway underpasses, shelters and halfway houses to talk to their subjects, and they also interviewed police officers, judges and social service workers.

“This is one of the most conspicuous problems our country faces, and it’s shameful that we haven’t solved it yet,” Sipchen said. “These editorials came from our hearts, and I think that’s why they were successful.”

Raksin acknowledged that while the problem remains, “we tried in our editorials to bust the orthodoxy that it can’t be--that people can’t be helped off the streets.”

The Washington Post, which now has won 37 Pulitzers, received this year’s prizes for investigative reporting and national reporting.

The Post’s prize-winning investigative stories were written by Sari Horwitz and Scott Higham, with the assistance of Sarah Cohen, the paper’s database editor. They exposed the District of Columbia’s role in the neglect and deaths of 229 children placed in its protective care from 1993 to 2000 and prompted an overhaul of the district’s child welfare system.

The Post has been writing about this for more than two years, and “in the face of the city completely stonewalling us, it took much very, very hard work,” said Leonard Downie Jr., the paper’s executive editor.

These stories were originally entered in both the investigative and public service categories, a not-uncommon practice. But the Pulitzers are awarded in a two-tier process, with three finalists chosen in each category by individual juries of five to seven journalists for each. Then the 17-person board that oversees the prizes and has ultimate authority over them makes the final decisions for all categories, sometimes overruling the juries.

The Post series was not judged one of the three best by the jury in the investigative category, but it was nominated as a finalist by the public service jury. The board shifted the stories to the investigative reporting category, thus eliminating the three finalists selected by the jury in that category.

One of those finalists was a series of stories in the Seattle Times on the deaths of several patients at a cancer research center in Seattle and the failure of doctors there to adequately inform the patients of the risks of their treatment.

That series triggered considerable controversy in the journalistic community after the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed column and an editorial last month attacking the series as unfair and inaccurate.

“It’s regrettable . . . and unfortunate that the Wall Street Journal entered the fray that way,” Michael Fancher, executive editor of the Seattle Times, said Monday, “but the Washington Post entry was an excellent piece of journalism, and while there’s no way for me to know if the Journal had any effect, I think the [Pulitzer] board knows how to sort that stuff out.”

Seymour Topping, the prize administrator, said the board did note the criticisms of the Seattle series, by various sources, but its final decision “had nothing to do with any of the complaints that were lodged.”

The Post’s other Pulitzer went to its staff, in national reporting, for “comprehensive coverage of America’s war on terrorism.” These stories, the Pulitzer Board said, “regularly brought forth new information” and provided “skilled analysis of unfolding developments.”

The Wall Street Journal won the award for breaking news, a tribute to its “comprehensive and insightful coverage, executed under the most difficult circumstances, of the terrorist attacks on New York City, which recounted the day’s events and their implications for the future.”

The attacks on the World Trade Center, diagonally across the street from the Journal offices, forced the staff to evacuate its badly damaged offices and produce the next day’s paper from a plant in New Jersey.

The Journal celebration was somewhat subdued, in part because staffer Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and killed in Pakistan while covering terrorism.

Among the other New York Times prizes were those for Barry Bearak, in the international reporting category, for his “deeply affecting and illuminating coverage” of daily life in war-torn Afghanistan.

“Afghanistan is at once the most beautiful country on the planet and also the most unfortunate,” Bearak said, “a desperate place, a sad place.”

Several newsroom celebrants made similar comments, and during the New York Times ceremony, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, called for a moment of silence for those killed on Sept. 11 and in the war in Afghanistan.

Howell Raines, executive editor of the Times, said, “We’re tremendously gratified by the awards and proud of the journalistic accomplishment, but we’re ever-mindful that this journalism was about shattering events for our city and our country and the world community, and that helps keep all this in the proper perspective.”

Raines told his staff they’re “the greatest in the world” and said that while he generally tries to avoid superlatives, he wanted to quote “Mississippi’s greatest moral philosopher, Dizzy Dean [the former baseball star], who said, ‘It ain’t bragging if you really done it.’ ”

Raines took over editorial leadership of the Times five days before Sept. 11, and he made a point Monday of thanking his predecessor, Joseph Lelyveld, for “starting us down the path” to Monday’s awards.

Traditionally, the Pulitzer board has taken special pleasure in recognizing the work of smaller newspapers. But this year, 12 of the 14 prizes went to the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, and there were no small-town winners.

Some of that is attributable to the events of Sept. 11. No other event has so dominated the prizes in their 85-year history. But as John Carroll said during the Los Angeles Times Pulitzer celebration, while this year’s prizes are good for the winning papers, they add up to “a bad thing for American journalism.”

“It tells us much about the gap between the elite press and the non-elite press,” he said.

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Times staff writer John J. Goldman in New York contributed to this story.

To read the Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning articles and see video of the winners, go to latimes.com/pulitzer.

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