Should the Pulitzer Rules Be Changed?   

Some are wondering whether small papers stand a chance in the awards

When the New York Times won seven Pulitzer Prizes this year, leaving the previous record of three in the dust, and only five other papers--including three powerhouses--took home the rest of the awards, some media minds began to wonder if the Pulitzer system is weighted too heavily toward the big guys.

They ask whether it's time for Columbia University, which oversees the prizes, and the Pulitzer Board, which picks the winners, to model the program after the National Magazine Awards. There, awards in each category are given for different circulation levels.

"When four of the biggest, richest papers win 12 of the 14 prizes, it's apparent that awfully good work being done by smaller and midsize newspapers is being totally overshadowed," says Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz. "Nobody expects the Sacramento Bee or the Kansas City Star to cover 9/11 the way the New York Times does, but lots of papers do awfully good and important work in their backyards, and they got almost totally overlooked."

Though last year was an unusual news year with the terrorist attacks and the ensuing war, Kurtz says there "seems to be an unofficial quota for the occasional Vermont editorial writer or North Dakota paper covering a flood. We don't want the Pulitzers to turn into a version of Major League Baseball, where only the big-city clubs have payrolls to fully compete."

The idea is worth considering, says Aly Colón, director of diversity programs at the Poynter Institute and a member of its ethics faculty. Smaller papers winning Pulitzers, he says, "is rarer than it should be."

"It is challenging even in times when there is not an event like September 11 for midsize and smaller papers to compete with behemoths like the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal," Colón says. "It pits them against size, resources, experience, opportunity and access that smaller papers find hard to compete with."

However, he points out, the little guys do sometimes win journalism's highest honor, and their achievements could be diminished if they were to win only within a circulation category. He says the Pulitzer Board should consider creating categories that would put newspapers on more equal footing.

"There may be ways to pick up on areas of coverage that are common to newspapers everywhere, regardless of size, that might make it more competitive for regional and smaller papers," he says, explaining that categories for law enforcement, education and neighborhood reporting could help spread the Pulitzer wealth.

Los Angeles Times Managing Editor Dean Baquet, who was a Pulitzer judge this year, says it would be "a huge mistake" to change the architecture of the Pulitzers. Nothing is better for a small or medium-size paper, he says, than to win a Pulitzer and show journalists around the country that they can compete with--and beat--the big ones.

"I'm nervous about turning the whole thing on its head because of one year that may turn out to be an anomaly," says Baquet, whose paper won two Pulitzers this year. However, he worries that as papers slash staffs and shrink newsholes, a big-paper Pulitzer juggernaut may develop not because the large papers are getting better, but because the rest of the heap is getting worse.

"I like to believe that what created the imbalance is that the biggest story in a generation broke in the largest city in the country," he says. "But we also have to be a little worried that it's for another reason."

Dan Kennedy, media critic for the Boston Phoenix, isn't worried about a creeping big-paper award hegemony. Big papers won because of the nature of the news and the superlative coverage they offered, he says. Eight of the 14 Pulitzer Prizes went to coverage of 9/11 and the war on terrorism.

"We had the single biggest news event in 60 years and it took place in the backyard of the biggest paper," he says. "It's not surprising, nor does it cause me distress."

Kennedy asks, "On some certain cosmic level is it fair that the Times won six Pulitzers for the coverage of the war on terrorism? I suppose it isn't. It's like the Yankees winning the World Series again, but they are the best and no one can take that away from them."

He doesn't like the idea of doling out Pulitzers for different circulation categories, saying Pulitzers have a "better brand name" than the National Magazine Awards because, at least in theory, "everyone is competing equally."

Fiddling with the structure of the Pulitzers would be a mistake, says Bob Giles, curator of Harvard University's Nieman Foundation. The Pulitzer Board, he says, doesn't keep tabs on which papers have won or how often. It simply chooses the best work of the year and by doing so, he says, it "sets a standard that newspapers large and small should shoot for."

"At the end of the day, if the Times wins seven, that's the way it is, that's what the process was established to do," he says.

Giles agrees there is a "trend" of the biggest and richest papers garnering more Pulitzers. Reporters and editors in select big-city newsrooms marinate in a culture that values prestigious journalism prizes, he says. The companies that own the newspapers cherish quality journalism, and they buttress their public rhetoric with investments. These papers are best able to conceptualize and execute great stories, he says.

Yet, tweaking how the prizes are awarded could help, Giles says. "To be a Pulitzer finalist these days is quite a distinction," he says. "I think the [Pulitzer] Board should consider announcing the finalists sometime before [the announcement of the prizes], so those individuals can have a greater recognition of being finalists."

As for the New York Times staff, it's "honored and humbled" by its corral of half of this year's Pulitzers, says Howell Raines, the newspaper's executive editor. Raines moved into the job days before September 11.

He is particularly proud to receive the public service Pulitzer for the stand-alone A Nation Challenged section it ran for months following the attacks, and for the "Portraits of Grief" series, which featured hundreds of nimbly written obituaries of people who died in the World Trade Center attacks.

"I'm sure I had the experience of many other editors on the day of 9/11, which was everybody in the profession runs on professional responses," he says. "There is no way any single person can say, 'We need to be at location A, B, C and D,' and so on. Every daily newspaper is a miracle of teamwork, never more so at a time like this."