Ganim / Patriot-News Win Pulitzer for Sandusky / PSU Coverage

I would hope so. If you've lost the heart by age 24, well . . .

 

Sorry for the premature post - still on page 1 - but that pose in the photo reminds me exactly of one a female coworker had when she stood in front of the rest of us after having won a big award: a combination of shyness, humility and probably just a smidge of embarrassment from the attention.

 

Looks like modesty to me. And modesty is good.

 

Beautifully stated.

 

Word for word, and then some.

Congratulations to her, her bosses, to the paper and its extended family (friends, spouses, significant others, and more). It couldn't have been easy for any of them, especially given the context we all know too well by now.

Well deserved. Well done.

 

Easier said than done. I had it beat out of me by about 26 (and a good deal of it was my fault, not blaming employers for that). So I admire that she has that passion, and I wish I could rekindle my own a bit more.

 

Wonderful to see such solid work being rewarded at the highest possible level. Congratulations, Sara.

 

Seriously, I don't mean to call you out toooooooo much (just too much), but fuck that attitude. Sara Ganim won this Pulitzer Prize in part because she worked her fucking ass off and in part because she's really talented and in part because she stumbled on this story early and in part because this story existed at her alma mater and in part because she was put on a beat that necessitated this type (if not level) of reporting. But if she never wins another Pulitzer Prize, that doesn't mean her career is not a failure. I've known at least 10 Pulitzer Prize winners, some through journalism school and a few through work. The best investigative repoter I've ever known with has not won a Pulitzer (though he's been a finalist and certainly has received consideration at least a few other times). He's a dogged-ass motherfucker who wors his ass off and is really talented and finds stories others don't find. And he doesn't need a Pulitzer Prize to validate his career, though he'd be ecstatic, and deservingly so, to win one.

This isn't a matter of following "Layla." Sara Ganim likely will never work on a story this explosive again. I hope she doesn't, as I hope we don't have many more major-college football coordinators diddling boys too often. But she'll do a hell of a lot of fine work in whatever field she chooses as long as she stays as motivated as she was for this report. We live a disposable existence. Our words are printed on the cheapest of paper and the tackiest of websites. They likely won't live on in history like a well-bound Robert Caro book. But they're important. I choose to believe so, at least. Maybe that makes me naive. I wouldn't have it any other way.

This isn't a game of one-upsmanship. Ganim will be a Pulitzer Prize winner for the rest of her life, which hopefully will bankroll her journalism career for as long as paid journalism continues to exist. It's a hell of an award. But she can't dodge the next assignment that she gets or swing for the Pulitzer fences in every story, and I'm pretty sure she gets that. And if she never covers another story this big again, that doesn't make her the journalistic equivalent of Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock. It makes her a reporter, in this case, a crime reporter, who covers her assignments with gusto and diligence and effort and skill that earned her a Pulitzer, even if the next story doesn't involve a conspiracy at one of the biggest public universities in the country.

That's how this shit works. Ganim seems to understand that. Good for her.

 

Once again, I will echo what everyone's said on here. The Harrisburg paper more than holds its own with the other Pennsylvania papers in the state. It was one of the papers I thoroughly enjoyed reading while on spring trips out that way... it's a kick-ass paper for a city that size.

Sara should be proud, and she appears humbled and shocked at the same time. Yet she still has a hunger for news. That's more than I can say about some people in this business that are her age.

 

I hated them when I thought they were hot-pink booties with that paisley top. But if you watch the video, she's lost the shoes and is padding around in socks. I can always get behind hot-pink socks.

 

Great for her and great for all the folks at the Patriot-News. I too liked SF's post.

I look forward to Pulitzer day every year, although I am not much interested in other contests like the APSE, which has been watered down far too much. The Pulitzers are huge, especially if you aren't one of the big four or the AP, and you think you might have a contender, or even just want to live vicariously for papers like Harrisburg. But there is a degree of luck involved in the Pulitzers. One year in the 1990s, we won for something we didn't really expect would win and were finalists on something we thought had a good shot, but the long series that we thought was our best bet -- some thought it would be a lock for the public service medal, after it won some other solid awards -- didn't get anything on Pulitzer day.

As many of us probably have seen, there is no champagne for being a finalist, which is sort of a shame because there are so many entries and you don't get that far unless it's really well done (which is why it baffles me when they refuse to choose a winner in a category, as they did this year for editorials, because nothing supposedly deserved it).

Early in my career, I got hired by a mid-major that had won one the year before I got there, and then we were finalists not the year I arrived but the next April and then my final April there, and those were treated as no big deal. No big deal! They were monumentally great pieces of journalism and our Sunday circ was only about 150,000. How can we pretend to be disappointed competing among the nation's best? We did our best, but we had no control over some other staff doing slightly better work or simply being perceived as being a little better.

Current paper won one last year, was a finalist the year before (again, no champagne) and got nothing this year -- although we had a great 2011 in my opinion because we never failed to blow it out on the important breaking news, and I also thought we had a small shot at being a finalist in features.

Last year I was happy for a lot of people here, but especially for our publisher because it was his first win. I'd worked for him in my late teens and early 20s when he was editor of a much smaller paper. As I told him last year, he easily could have won a couple times in the early 1980s -- there was investigative work that would have been the epitome of the ballsy small paper taking on the local establishment (politicians, including a state senator, went to prison). It's not like our publisher finally became a great journalist at age 60. He always was one. By the way, the lead reporter on the last of those investigative series? He went on to become a finalist for another paper within a decade. Then we crossed paths again on the staff of another paper, where he did win a Pulitzer. Now he writes for the NYT. I had to email him last year because one of the pols he helped send to the Big House three decades ago is going to have a building named after him by the city he robbed blind. You cannot make up shit like that.

 

Depends on what's considered local.

NY Times can win a Pulitzer for covering something in NYC, and it'd be considered local.