This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
I am among those who are deliriously happy for the team of editors, reporters and photographers who did the hard, long and often gut-wrenching work that led to Monday's awarding of the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting to The Salt Lake Tribune.
I only bask in their glory. I did exactly none of the work. About the only things I have to do with their award is that I know these folks, I got to drink some of their sparkling wine and — accidentally, I assure you — photobombed the picture of the staff that ran on the front page of Tuesday's paper. Standing in, I guess, for the ghost of Joseph Pulitzer. (We are both bearded, liberal newspapermen. And I've been to St. Louis a few times.)
Almost as fun for me was the news that this year's Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing went to someone I don't know but sort of used to be.
The editorial writing prize is the one that often goes to some of the smaller newspapers. That's because it doesn't depend on having an investigative staff or a bureau in Rangoon. It's about the writing, pure and simple.
Or, as the Pulitzer Board itself puts it every year. "For distinguished editorial writing, the test of excellence being clearness of style, moral purpose, sound reasoning, and power to influence public opinion in what the writer conceives to be the right direction..."
This year that prize went to Art Cullen, a jack of all journalistic trades at The Storm Lake Times in Storm Lake, Iowa, "For editorials fueled by tenacious reporting, impressive expertise and engaging writing that successfully challenged powerful corporate agricultural interests in Iowa."
Like the articles that won the Tribune its prize, Cullen's point was to speak truth to, and about, power.
The Tribune reports called out the powers that be at Brigham Young University — and, less directly, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which owns it — before moving on to the state and local officials who blew off far too many accusations of sexual assault leveled by several young women against the same Utah State University football player.
That's pretty powerful stuff in any event. In this case, it was even more astounding because so many of the victims were willing not only to tell their story, but have their real names and photographs used in print and online. Because they, and we, knew that was the way to make their stories real. To make it all but impossible to look away.
If there were a Pulitzer for sources, those people would have had no competition.
But if there's anything as brave as taking on the LDS Church in Utah, it might be taking on Monsanto, Cargill and Koch Industries in Iowa.
That's what Cullen did in Storm Lake. He called out the state's agribusiness giants for secretly funneling money to local governments, money used to fight off the downstream Des Moines Water Works and others who were trying to halt the continuing excess of agricultural chemicals and other runoff.
Cullen and his family run the twice-weekly paper with a circulation of 3,000. They do everything. Report. Edit. Take pictures. Lay out and proof pages. And, before they contracted that out to another publisher, run the press.
I empathize. I spent a few years reporting, writing editorials and, on Friday nights, helping to pull the newspapers off the press, for newspapers almost as small in Kansas. At one of the larger of them, I was a finalist for the Pulitzer in 1998. The winner that year ran a neighborhood weekly in the Riverdale area of New York City, and the other finalist wrote for the Colorado Daily in Boulder.
Winners in that category have also included newspapers in Rutland, Vt.; Ames, Iowa; Charlotte Harbor, Fla.; Glens Falls, N.Y.; Birmingham, Ala.; and Pottstown, Penn.
In 1998, the three of us did a panel discussion and talked about how, as writers for small newspapers, we had both the burden and pleasure of saying whatever we wanted, at whatever length, without having to sit through editorial board meetings or win consensus from management.
As one observant writer put it that day, we had room but no board.
Or maybe it just helps that you have the word "Lake" in the name of your newspaper.
George Pyle, editorial page editor of The Salt Lake Tribune, has spent much of his life in towns that are near a lake, have something to do with salt, or both.