The Pulitzer Prize

Next year marks the centennial celebration of the Pulitzer Prize. First awarded in four categories in 1917, the prize has grown over the last century. Joseph Pulitzer set up the prize to recognize excellence in journalism. I summarize the history of the prize in this post, but you can read more on the Pulitzer Prize website.

Joseph Pulitzer himself was an editor in the nineteenth century, but I remember him from a based-on-fact Disney musical from the 1990s: Newsies. My middle school students were subjected to watching it, and listening to me sing along, when we talked about the Progressive Era. In 1899, the newsies of New York (the boys, mostly orphans and runaways, who stood on street corners and hawked newspapers -- "Headlines don't sell papes. Newsies sell papes!") went on strike because Joseph Pulitzer, owner of the New York World, and William Randolph Hurst, owner of the New York Journal, raised the price at which newsies purchased their papers, costing the boys pennies they didn't have and making the newspaper owners millions.

When he died in 1911, Joseph Pulitzer bequeathed $2 million to Columbia University to be awarded to journalists each year. Not too many years before, Pulitzer had given money to Columbia to open the nation's first school of journalism at the university level. He believed in journalism, as a means of communication and as an art form. Today prizes are also awarded for photographic journalism.

There were four recipients the first year, 1917. Jean Jules Jusserand, a Frenchman, won $2,000 for a history of America, "With Americans of Past and Present Days." Laura E. Richards and Maude Howe Elliott won for the biography/autobiography, for a piece about Julia Ward Howe, abolitionist. A prize was awarded for editorial writing, but no name is given. The final award that year went to Herbert Bayer Swope, for a series of articles appearing in October and November 1916 about the German government. (Europe was caught up in WWI, but America wouldn't join the war until 1917.)

Journalists, photojournalists, and authors of book-length journalism can enter their works for consideration every year. Details are on the website above. If you're not a journalist yourself but are interested to know who the winners are, the winners and finalists for 2016 have been posted.

Journalism communicates the news, locally, nationally, and globally. It brings to the forefront situations in need of change. It makes us aware of what we sometimes refuse to see. Photographic journalism has the added poignancy of faces to go with names and stories. This year's winner is Jessica Rinaldi, of the Boston Globe, and her winning entry, and the story of young Strider Wolfe, can be accessed on the website.

The journalism of Pulitzer's day was known for its sensationalism, blending truth with exaggeration to get readers' attention and money. Today's news media are often a not-so-distant cousin, gaining our attention with flashy images and startling headlines and then beating us with it for hours on end. But today's "reader" has many choices for news outlets, and we have two responses. We turn it off, or we allow ourselves to become desensitized to it all.

Winners of the Pulitzer Prize are good at what they do, the best in their fields. The messages they bring are worthy of our attention.