A Pulitzer Drought Comes to an End   

Veteran Philadelphia Inquirer staffer and part time playwright Donald Drake says the scene couldn't have played out better if he'd written it himself: embattled Inquirer Editor Maxwell E.P. King standing on the city desk, rallying the jubilant staff on Pulitzer day as an almost audible sense of relief swept the newsroom.

The Inquirer's Pulitzer drought, which began conspicuously when editor Gene Roberts left the paper and King succeeded him in 1990, was finally over. Reporter Michael Vitez and photographers April Saul and Ron Cortes won the coveted prize in the explanatory journalism category last month for a series illustrating how families confront death, a story suggested by King after the funeral of his own aunt.

"It's a shame that a Pulitzer has to have such symbolic meaning, but it does," says Drake, a 30-year Inquirer veteran who edited the winning five-part series. "It was just like black crepe around here..with dozens of buyouts of editors and reporters. Then, just as we're about to move into this symbolic new newsroom downstairs, there's the breaking of this long fast of ours."

King is careful to downplay the power of the prize, but the numbers — 17 Pulitzers in 18 years under Roberts' reign — have hung over his head since he took over amid corporate downsizing (see "The Pulitzer Pall," January/February 1995). Even the Inquirer's story on the win said critics link Roberts' departure with "the end of journalistic excellence at the paper."

"The real irony is that it took so long," says King, citing the 17 Pulitzer finalists the paper has had since 1990.

Roberts, now managing editor of the New York Times, says he sympathizes with King's plight. He too went through a four-year Pulitzer dry period as editor in Philadelphia during the early 1980s.

"We were beginning to feel jinxed, then suddenly we started winning. It's unpredictable," says Roberts, whose current paper also won a Pulitzer this year, in international reporting, for John Burns' coverage of Afghanistan.

Vitez, a 12-year Inquirer veteran who covers the aging beat, says Philadelphia may finally have a winner because his project hearkened back to the paper's golden age.

"I was told, 'Go anywhere in the world, spare no expense,' in typical Inquirer fashion," Vitez says, though King claims he doesn't remember granting the reporter so much freedom.

Vitez didn't end up going far. Over several months he chose a number of families, including one living on his own street, and chronicled how they coped with aging and death in an absorbing 600-plus-inch narrative that ran over a week last November.

The subject matter wasn't unique, but the intimacy of the detail and the photographs resonated with readers who watched strangers die on the page.

Vitez, 40, says he gained the trust of his subjects and their families by following his editor's advice and telling them they could back out of the story at any time, up until the day before publication. None did.

Vitez and Drake, the paper's 62-year-old assistant metro editor specializing in narrative writing, took several weeks to fashion the stories into a series of scenes and dialogues illustrated by Saul's and Cortes' photographs. Vitez, an amateur screenwriter in his spare time, and Drake, the part time playwright, used storytelling techniques to heighten the impact of the articles before editor Dorothy Brown did the final editing. The group took chances, like putting important details at the end of 150 inches of copy, confident that readers would finish if the narrative was compelling enough. ("Final Choices — Seeking the Good Death" can be read online at www.phillynews.com/
packages/end_of_life/ .)

Inquirer staffers admit that the accolades given to the series have renewed hope among those who weathered the paper's financial storm and resisted lucrative buyouts to stick with King while others questioned whether the paper would ever be what it once was.

"When Gene Roberts was here nothing we could do was bad. [King] has had to live in the shadow of this godlike creature," Drake says, attempting to put the last seven years in perspective. "What a good play this would make."