Friday, March 29, 2024

Opinion | Pulitzer citations lay on the superlative language



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If so, congratulations: You’ve received a Pulitzer Prize, journalism’s highest honor and a distinction that confers $15,000, a free lunch and maybe the most underrated perk of all: a rigorously edited quotation, full with copious (learn: extraneous) adverbs and adjectives, praising your work. That flowery language — a blast of flattery that humble previous you’d by no means dare formulate — is bound to be quoted in the fawning Pulitzer media protection, your speaker bio and even perhaps your obituary.

Jennifer Senior, a employees author at the Atlantic, received this 12 months’s Pulitzer in the characteristic class for a, nicely, let’s let the Pulitzer individuals describe it: “For an unflinching portrait of a family’s reckoning with loss in the 20 years since 9/11, masterfully braiding the author’s personal connection to the story with sensitive reporting that reveals the long reach of grief.” Now that’s some feature-style quotation writing. Saul Pett of the Associated Press, have been he alive immediately, would possibly envy Senior’s therapy, contemplating that his 1982 quotation in the identical class consisted of those seven phrases: “For an article profiling the federal bureaucracy.”

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Reached by cellphone, Senior referred questions on the description to the Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg.

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“I think it does a pretty good job,” Goldberg instructed the Erik Wemple Blog. “It certainly means they read it.” The Atlantic could nicely have earned the highest honor ever accorded to a bit of anniversary journalism, a class that veers towards the predictable and nostalgic. “It’s a testament to the strength of Jen Senior’s writing and reporting that what technically could be categorized as an anniversary story won a Pulitzer.”

Marjorie Miller, administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, says that individuals have lots of choices with regards to studying materials, a dynamic with implications for the citations for each conventional journalism and the e book classes. “We want to make sure that they are really evocative, and try as best as you can to tell people what the book is about so they want to read the book or the journalism,” says Miller. There’s been a motion to make the citations “stronger over time,” she famous.

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A dip into the archives offers some supporting proof for Miller’s level about the shift. The Post on Monday received the Public Service prize — which awards a gold medal as an alternative of money — for “its compellingly told and vividly presented account of the assault on Washington on January 6, 2021, providing the public with a thorough and unflinching understanding of one of the nation’s darkest days.” (Reporters who flinch stand no shot with the Pulitzer board.)

Compare that flourish with the quotation for The Post’s public service award from 1973: “for its investigation of the Watergate case.”

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein received robbed!

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“It reflects an understated style that was prevalent back in that time,” The Post’s Woodward, sounding unaggrieved at this historic slight, instructed the Erik Wemple Blog.

That understated model got here by in the class of “Telegraphic Reporting – National,” which celebrated the work of the Baltimore Sun’s Dewey L. Fleming, “For his distinguished reporting during the year 1943.”

Full-throated endorsements aren’t an solely fashionable factor, nonetheless, as this 1933 quotation for Associated Press reporter Francis A. Jamieson makes clear: “For his prompt, full, skillful and prolonged coverage of news of the kidnapping of the infant son of Charles Lindbergh on March 1, 1932, from the first announcement of the kidnapping until after the discovery of the baby’s body nearby the Lindbergh home on May 12.”

Pulitzer juries — usually a half-dozen journalists — sift by mountains of submissions in arriving at their nominations for finalists. Before handing off their decisions to the omnipotent Pulitzer board, they take a primary whack at the citations. Tone is a key consideration. “Clearly you don’t want to overstate the case because that would run contrary to the core principles of journalism, of telling the truth,” says Jeffrey Good, a veteran journalist who has labored on 4 Pulitzer juries. “In my experience, when we were effusive, effusiveness was warranted.”

Scrolling by archival Pulitzer citations yields hints of journalistic sensibilities which have gone the manner of the afternoon paper. The notion, for example, that newspapers orchestrate advocacy “campaigns” runs robust in early Pulitzer citations in the public service class. The Indianapolis News received that recognition in 1932 for “its successful campaign to eliminate waste in city management and to reduce the tax levy”; the Whiteville News Reporter and Tabor City Tribune of North Carolina secured the identical prize in 1953 for “their successful campaign against the Ku Klux Klan, waged on their own doorstep at the risk of economic loss and personal danger, culminating in the conviction of over one hundred Klansmen and an end to terrorism in their communities.”

Such “campaign” references in the public service citations remained sturdy by the Sixties after which petered out (with one every in 1971 and 1983). Matthew Pressman, who chronicled Twentieth-century journalism currents in his e book “On Press: The Liberal Values That Shaped the News,” writes through e mail: “With the increase in accusations of political bias against the news media starting in the late ’60s, journalists — and especially managers — at mainstream newspapers didn’t want to be seen as ‘campaigning’ for anything.” (Pressman cautioned that he’s not aware of the Pulitzer board’s rationale for its diction.)

“[N]ot a conscious stylistic departure,” notes Deputy Administrator Edward Kliment, who factors out that “campaign” nonetheless often pops up in the “editorial writing” class. “It may have more to do with changes in the descriptions used by journalists.”

Heavier rotation of adverbs and adjectives in public-service citations began in the Nineties. Whereas the board was as soon as content material to credit score reporting that merely “examined environmental threats and damage,” it started to hype shoe-leather efforts reminiscent of a “detailed and unflinching examination of systematic problems within the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service” or a mission that “coherently and comprehensively covered the tragic events [of Sept. 11], profiled the victims, and tracked the developing story, locally and globally.”

Which is to say, fashionable Pulitzer citations may not survive the crimson pen of your Hemingway-loving highschool English instructor.

“I’m a verb kind of girl,” says Miller, who got here to the Pulitzers from the linguistically spare pastures of the Associated Press. Even so, Miller espouses no plans to amend the Pulitzers’ florid quotation model. “My feeling is, it’s not broken,” she says. Which interprets to: If you possibly can’t overuse adverbs and adjectives to laud the nation’s finest journalism, when can you overuse adverbs and adjectives?

Plus, laying it on thick enchants the individuals who produced the award-winning work. “We live in a more emotional age. I think I prefer the descriptive slash effusive style,” says Goldberg.



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