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

She was personally attacked over it.

The early comments, especially on the March story that the national media ignored, were brutal.

 

We'll agree to disagree.

Speaking from experience, I know that every time I've ever written something that I thought was really good or really impactful or really tough or semi-courageous to report, I've been troubled about how whether I'd be able to top myself - and we're talking piddly ass shit compared to what Ganim reported. There were times I seriously considered moving to news - and that's mostly all I work in now as a freelancer - because I thought that I'd be less likely to run out of life-and-death-type stories on that side of the building. I remember covering a court case from beginning to end and it was so eye-opening to me. Here I was covering games and picking all-area teams and having to work the phones, and there was this whole world of public records and documents and so forth. It was honestly tough to go back to daily reporting for a while after that, wondering when the next big story might come.

In other words, we all might be projecting a little bit. But I wouldn't call it cynicism. Empathy is more like it. I bet even Jose Bautista wonders when the next home run will come.

 

Mark Mahoney of the Glens Falls Post-Star, who won the 2009 Pulitzer for editorial writing, left the paper in the third or fourth quarter of 2011 to become the Communications director for the New York State Bar Association.

Not a bad decision, since Lee just fileted the Post-Star by slicing 10 jobs, most in the news room.

I do not think they have replaced him, though they did advertise the position.

 

The Pulitzer winner I worked with, who was 26, didn't get out of journalism entirely. She became a producer for This American Life. But writing became a bit of a burden for a time because every story she wrote came with the invisible subtitle "Pulitzer Winner!" And it makes it kind of hard to pull the trigger on a silly weekend centerpiece when you feel like people -- especially young, ambitious and even jealous colleagues -- are monitoring every key stoke. I remember people saying "God, how long has it been since she was in the paper? Must be nice to coast on that Pulitzer."

It was total bullshit of course. But that mentality exists.

Wasn't it Hemingway or Leibling who said "Want to ruin a your writer? Give him an award."

I'd love to see Ganim, especially since she's a Florida gal at heart, end up at a nurturing paper like the Tampa Bay Times, where there is a lot more of a nurturing atmosphere than a ruthlessly competitive one like the Times.

In the end, though, your only a slave to your own expectations. But let's not pretend the stuff Dick, Mizzou and I are talking about doesn't exist. Bissinger's first book was Friday Night Lights. He's flat out admitted it set the bar unfairly high for the rest of his career, and he struggled with it. Roger Kahn once got snippy with me because I told him how much I enjoyed "Boys of Summer." "I've written some other good books too," he said. "You should check them out."

But again, congrats to Sara. I'm married to a former cops/courts reporter. I really appreciated how well sourced and on top of everything she was. Frankly, what she did has tremendous value to a newspaper of any size. It's what every your journalism grad should be striving to do at that age -- own your beat. Because you never know what might happen.

 

Of course.

Another great moment, as the "Move along . . . nothing to see, here" idiots get hung out to dry.

 

At least the pictures on the Patriot-News website were of the award winner. When Daniel Gilbert won at Bristol, you'd thought the managing editor had won the Pulitzer because he was in every single picture.

 

Oh man, that was the guy who also wrote the "YEAH, SUCK IT WASHINGTON POST!!!!" op-ed, right?

 

Weirdest thread ever.

 

Oh, these papers can. They once did. It'd just mean the bean counters take less.

I'd prefer good young reporters stay local, personally. Especially now. Bigger papers do great work and earn awards, no doubt, but they often do so not through ingenuity and great enterprise, but taking a topic in the news and throwing time, money and space at it. Which is fine. That's what they're supposed to do, and do well.

Just never have viewed talent that way myself.

 

I've worked with two who have won two apiece, but the one guy won both years before I arrived (nine years apart, both for stories that got people sprung from death row) and the other one left for another place after winning the first one, then won 11 years later at the new place. I wonder what you say the second time.

Of course, staying in one place does not necessarily mean you'll continue to receive what you'd consider star treatment. One winner stayed and sued the paper for sex discrimination three years later. According to AJR in 1993, "Tamar Stieber of the Albuquerque Journal , whose science reporting won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 and brought her a promotion to special projects reporter, charges that she was given so many daily assignments her promotion was 'nearly meaningless.' Also, the suit charges, Stieber still makes less than her male counterparts. Journal Editor Gerald Crawford says the newspaper 'has a different view of the facts than she does, and we feel that she's been fairly treated.' "

http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=1217

Stieber was one of three finalists in that category profiled in Doug Bates' terrific 1991 book, The Pulitzer Prize: The Inside Story of America's Most Prestigious Award. Bates would win a Pulitzer himself 15 years after his book was published, for The Oregonian.

 

Wow. What an ungracious thing to say.