The Pulitzer Prizes for 2008 include six for The Washington Post, among them the "breaking news" prize for coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings a year ago next week. The paper also won the meritorious public service medal for exposing mistreatment of veterans at Walter
Reed Hospital, a series that led to improvement of conditions there.
The Pulitzer Web site hadn't yet posted the winning stories when my broadcast-news-veteran colleague Joe Staniunas reminded me it was Pulitzer announcement day, but the Post's own story archive about Virginia Tech has been online all year, including texts, photographs, video, multimedia and discussions. (Today it added a page of all its Pulitzer submissions.)
Joe also mentioned that Roanoke station WSLS won a Peabody Award last week for its coverage of the shootings, a story I'd missed, what with the entertainment-oriented and Iraq war news Peabody winners taking most of the headlines. Buried down among the 35 awards in the press release, the WSLS citation praises the local broadcasters for "two intense days of live, exhaustive and remarkably calm coverage." Joe and I both expected to see The Roanoke Times as a Pulitzer finalist in the breaking news category for more excellent work last April. (The paper has been a finalist a few times before.)
If you enjoy good writing, but haven't used the Pulitzer.org website, take a look. The page for each award includes a "Works" tab with inks to the stories, photos, cartoons or other media that won the prize -- not just for this year, but all the winning stories for a dozen years that Web versions of newspaper stories have been available.
On the Post's website today, Howard Kurtz refers to the six awards as the largest haul in the paper's history, and Joel Achenbach reflects on all of the award stories being original reporting, "probably our best gimmick." They were, he says, "full of shoe-leather journalism, from the coverage of the Virginia Tech
tragedy to Steve Pearlstein's reporting-driven columns in the biz
section."
Achenbach gives a special nod to a story that won the feature writing award for his colleague Gene Weingarten, a story that ran with the catchy but not terribly informative headline Pearls Before Breakfast. I'm so glad he pointed it out. The sub-head is "Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let's find out." Here's its lead:
He emerged from the Metro at the L'Enfant Plaza station and positioned himself against a wall beside a trash basket. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in
jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap.
From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his
feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed
money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play. The story has everything -- great detail, humor, sadness, beauty, suspense, surprise, a naked Greta Scacchi.... and more than one punchline. It's a Sunday magazine-length piece, more than 7,000 words, but I hope students who love writing will take time to read. Don't rush through to the end any more than you would skip to the last phrase on a CD of Joshua Bell playing his $3.5 million Stradivarius.
Of course the Post wasn't the only Pulitzer winner. The New York
Times and the Chicago Tribune won investigative reporting Pulitzers for uncovering toxic imports and hazardous children's products, respectively. The Times' Amy Harmon won an "explanatory reporting" prize for finding human stories to illustrate the ethical issues in DNA testing. A Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel story about county corruption won the "local reporting" prize. All are, or will be, readable at http://pulitzer.org
The Post's other prize categories included national reporting (about Dick Cheney), international reporting (private security firms in Iraq) and commentary (by Steven Pearlstein).
While the story about Joshua Bell in the D.C. subway was a pleasant surprise, the Pulitzer board had another musical prize I didn't expect: A "Special Citation," down there beneath the other non-journalism awards in arts and letters, to Bob Dylan: for "his profound
impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical
compositions of extraordinary poetic power."
That gives me an idea for a story... If you happen to wander through a Metro station and hear this weathered old guy with a harmonica, a guitar and a nasal voice, stop and listen.
7:34:47 PM 
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