Beating the Odds   

So you don't work at the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal or Washington Post, but you really, really want to win a Pulitzer? Take heart – there may be unexpected ways to increase your chances:

• Work someplace where disasters – natural or man-made – tend to occur. Pulitzers frequently go to such stories. One of the more obvious states is California, with its earthquakes, mudslides and massive brush fires, but hurricanes are another popular topic. So look as well to the Eastern coastal states where big hurricanes are likely in the next several years. (Not a Gulf Coast state – New Orleans' Times-Picayune, Sunday circulation 281,000 before Katrina, and Gulfport, Mississippi's Sun Herald, Sunday circulation 55,000, just got their Pulitzers.) In particular, consider states like New Jersey and Maryland – hurricane experts say their popular shores are way overdeveloped and overdue for a big one.

• Become a war correspondent, photographer, analyst or feature writer. Pulitzers have gone to journalists in every major conflict since the sinking of the Lusitania. In 1941, in fact, a group Pulitzer honored every U.S. war correspondent.

• Become an editorial cartoonist. It's a smaller pool, so your chances are better.

• International reporting, commentary and criticism are dominated by the largest papers, but editorial writing and public service in particular are categories in which lots of smaller papers have grabbed the brass ring.

• The nation's biggest paper by circulation – USA Today – has never won, but has been improving its journalism in recent years. Count on it to keep pressing for a Pulitzer.

• Is the glass half full or half empty? Depending on your point of view, these are either really good or really bad states in which to work if you want a Pulitzer: Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire, South Dakota and Wyoming. That's because no newspapers in those states have ever won. So maybe, just maybe, they're due.

• If you prefer more exotic locales, and you're the aforementioned glass-half-full type, try moving to American Samoa, Guam or the Northern Mariana Islands. They are U.S. territories or commonwealths, and their papers have never won either. (Pulitzers have gone to papers in the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, the latter now an independent nation.) A handful of foreign journalists have won over the years, generally because their work was distributed here by wire services.

• Speaking of wire services, the Associated Press has earned a total of 48 Pulitzers for writing and photography. And it has bureaus all over the place.

• Papers that have won the most Pulitzers are bunched in – you guessed it – New York, California and Washington, D.C. But go to the Pulitzer Web site (www.pulitzer.org) and take a gander at the papers that are frequent finalists – say, for example, the Seattle Times and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. There's lots of good journalism going on in these newsrooms – and many, many more.