Pulitzer’s Gold: Behind the Prize for Public Service Journalism By Roy J. Harris Jr.
University of Missouri Press
473 pages, $39.95

It is possible that hardly anybody would remember Joseph Pulitzer—he died in 1911—had he not attached his name to the Pulitzer Prizes. Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, established prizes in journalism, the arts, and letters as part of a bequest to Columbia University. (His will also created Columbia’s journalism school, but the university chose not to name the school for him.) After a wavering start in 1917, the prizes gradually became more reputable and occasionally controversial—and one of them, the gold medal for public-service journalism, has become a milestone for newspapers and their staffs. But as Roy Harris Jr. points out, there has never been a book about this particular prize. A journalist himself, he was inspired to write this chronicle by the work of his father, a reporter who played a role in winning three gold medals for the Post-Dispatch. Clearly, Harris knows his way around: using both the Pulitzer archives at Columbia and interviews with surviving winners, he recounts not only the obstacles that newspapers overcame in publishing their investigations, but goes on to trace the sometimes uncertain trails that led through the bureaucratic thicket at Columbia. Who remembers, for example, that the Columbia trustees, who still held a veto power, almost blocked the New York Times’s medal for publishing the Pentagon Papers in 1972? Or that The Washington Post’s Watergate coverage was initially ranked third or worse by jurors? As Harris notes, history came to the rescue of the Post, and Woodward and Bernstein, when the scandal broke open just before the advisory board’s decisive deliberations. There are many more such engaging stories. With newspapers in apparent, highly...

Complete access to this article will soon be available for purchase. Subscribers will be able to access this article, and the rest of CJR’s magazine archive, for free. Select articles from the last 6 months will remain free for all visitors to CJR.org.