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               \n building cases from a sampling of Pulitzer Prize winners over ninety years, Pulitzer’s Gold attempts to trace the development of one important facet of American journalism in a new way. I also wanted to acknowledge reporters, editors, and others who may have gotten little personal attention at the time because the Gold Medal is a newspaper honor, not an award for individuals. As the research evolved, I became fascinated as well with the Pulitzer Prize selection process, long steeped in secrecy.The Pulitzer organization graciously made jury reports and other documents available for this research. Further, current and former board members were willing to be interviewed about the inner workings of the Pulitzers. And for earlier periods, the private papers of Joseph Pulitzer II opened an intriguing window into the operation. J.P. II, a board member from  until his death in  and chairman starting in , loved to write notes to fellow board members about the decision-making. Likewise, he often communicated with his editors at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as they prepared to compete for Pulitzer Prizes. Because this book covers some newspaper work that is very fresh, and some that has been all but lost in dusty newspaper morgues and library archives, my research took a variety of forms. Reviewing the winning entries and supporting material kept in the Pulitzer archives at Columbia University was a starting point. But for most cases— including all ten winners from  to —I conducted in-person interviews in their newsrooms. Other interviews were by telephone, with follow-up e-mails. Published information about the journalism that won Gold Medals over the years is surprisingly thin. Fortunately, journalists who were involved in a number of the prizes, dating back to the s and earlier, were willing to share their own experiences to help expand the record. (My first in-person interviews were with people involved in the work that won the  Public Service Prize for the Post-Dispatch.) The most valuable library resource for research on the Pulitzer Prizes is the Columbia archive. Columbia has administered the prizes since they began, and keeps original entries and other material in the Rare Manuscripts area of Butler Library, just across the quadrangle from the Journalism Building.The Pulitzer Prize microfilm file is at Columbia’s Lehman Library. The www.pulitzer.org Web site is a convenient resource for checking prize-winners going back to . For work from  to the present, the site offers links to digitized versions of the articles that prize-winning newspapers submitted with their entries. A list of each year’s winners and finalists is easily retrieved by clicking on the Pulitzer  timeline across the top of the Web page. As of , however, the organization had not created links to winners for years prior to . In the fall of , I became a denizen of Butler’s Rare Manuscripts section, some days from the time it opened until it closed. For those interested in American journalism history, leafing through entries there is an epic adventure. As a newspaper junky, I found holding the actual submissions, just as the editors had prepared them for the Pulitzer judging, to be a true contact high. It is hard not to feel a sense of history in examining the blue-bound  Washington Post entry with its Watergate clippings from June  through the end of , and introduced by managing editor Howard Simons’s impassioned attempt to persuade Pulitzer jurors of the importance of the coverage. Among the volumes written about the Pulitzer Prizes, John Hohenberg’s are the most authoritative. The late administrator of the Pulitzers shared his considerable knowledge of how the board worked, and told wonderful stories about the process. However, only a relative handful of Public Service story descriptions appear in his books. One other record that is helpful, as much for its continuity as for the brief descriptions, is the archive of stories about the Pulitzer awards in Editor & Publisher, a newspaper trade publication that was already going strong when the Pulitzers began. At individual newspapers, articles about a Pulitzer project may appear in the reference library, sometimes in the form of an anniversary-year review of the prize. Many newspapers have commissioned corporate histories that devote special sections to any Pulitzer-winning. Academics or journalism students—at schools in the newspaper’s locale, especially—on occasion have written papers on award-winning work. Rarely, however, do these analyses describe in much detail the work that went into the coverage. Jury...

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